In 1937 Ettore Majorana introduced the concept of what are now
fittingly called Majorana fermions -- fermionic particles that are
their own antiparticles. Nowadays an active search for
condensed-matter analogues of these elusive objects is well
underway, motivated by both the prospect of revealing new facets
of quantum mechanics and longer-term quantum computing
applications. This talk will survey recent advances in this
pursuit. In particular, I will describe strategies for
"engineering" Majorana platforms from simple building blocks,
preliminary experimental successes, and future milestones that
reveal foundational aspects of Majorana physics directly relevant
for quantum computation.