[3] He is a research affiliate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[4] Margolus received his Ph.D. in physics in 1987 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Edward Fredkin.
[5] He founded and was chief scientist for Permabit, an information storage device company.
[6] Margolus was one of the organizers of a seminal research meeting on the connections between physics and computation theory, held on Mosquito Island in 1982.
[3][12][13] With Tommaso Toffoli, Margolus developed the CAM-6 cellular automaton simulation hardware, which he extensively described in his book with Toffoli, Cellular Automata Machines (MIT Press, 1987),[3][14] and with Tom Knight he developed the "Flattop" integrated circuit implementation of billiard-ball computation.