My work focuses on using superconducting circuits to study novel quantum phenomena. One major effort is the study of condensed matter physics with microwave photons in these circuits. While photons generally interact only weakly, my group is building systems where these interactions are strong, and are expected to lead to many-body effects, including phase transitions of light. A second major thrust of my work is to use these circuits for quantum computing. My team has developed a new type of superconducting qubit with a tunable dipole moment which allows the strength of coupling to microwaves to be dynamically tuned. This makes scaling easier, as decoupled qubits do not contribute to parasitic couplings.