Invited speaker biographies

• Alán Aspuru-Guzik, University of Toronto, Canada

Alán Aspuru-Guzik is a professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto and is also the Canada 150 Research Chair in Theoretical Chemistry and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. He is a CIFAR Lebovic Fellow in the Biologically Inspired Solar Energy program. Alán also holds a Google Industrial Research Chair in Quantum Computing. Alán is the director of the Acceleration Consortium, a University of Toronto-based strategic initiative that aims to gather researchers from industry, government and academia around pre-competitive research topics related to the lab of the future.

Alán began his independent career at Harvard University in 2006 and was a Full Professor at Harvard University from 2013-2018. He received his B.Sc. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 and obtained a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow from 2005-2006.

Alán conducts research in the interfaces of quantum information, chemistry, machine learning and chemistry. He was a pioneer in the development of algorithms and experimental implementations of quantum computers and quantum simulators dedicated to chemical systems. He has studied the role of quantum coherence in the transfer of excitonic energy in photosynthetic complexes and has accelerated the discovery by calculating organic semiconductors, organic photovoltaic energy, organic batteries and organic light-emitting diodes. He has worked on molecular representations and generative models for the automatic learning of molecular properties. Currently, Alán is interested in automation and “autonomous” chemical laboratories for accelerating scientific discovery.

Among other recognitions, he received the Google Focused Award for Quantum Computing, the Sloan Research Fellowship, The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, and was selected as one of the best innovators under the age of 35 by the MIT Technology Review. He is a member of the American Physical Society and an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and received the Early Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

• Michael Biercuk, University of Sydney/Q-CTRL

Michael J. Biercuk is the CEO and Founder of Q-CTRL, a quantum technology company, and a Professor of Quantum Physics and Quantum Technology at the University of Sydney. In his academic position he leads a research team as a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, exploring the role of control engineering in quantum-coherent systems. Michael earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Masters and PhD from Harvard University. He held a research fellowship in the Ion Storage Group at NIST Boulder, and has served as a full-time technical consultant to DARPA, helping to steer government investments in quantum information and advanced computer architectures. Michael is a SXSW and TEDx speaking alumnus and a multi-time Australian Museum Eureka Prize nominee and winner.

• Sergio Boixo, Google

Sergio Boixo leads the Quantum Computer Science group at Google Quantum AI. He was previously a research professor and quantum engineer at USC, and a postdoc at Harvard and Caltech. Sergio has a doctorate in physics from UNM, a master’s degree in physics from UAB, is a computer engineer from UCM, and studied mathematics and philosophy at UNED. Previously Sergio worked as a computer engineer at the European Central Bank and other companies.

• Susan Coppersmith, UNSW, Australia

Professor Susan Coppersmith is a theoretical condensed matter physicist who has made substantial contributions to the understanding of a broad range of subjects, including glasses, biominerals, granular materials, and quantum computers.  Her honors include fellowship in the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of New South Wales, as well as the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

Her current research focus is on the development of quantum computers using silicon technology similar to that used in modern classical computers, with a particular focus on the use of silicon/silicon-germanium heterostructures.  Some publications reporting this work are Z. Shi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 140503 (2012), D. Kim et al., Nature 511, 70 (2014), and T. F. Watson et al., Nature 555, 633-637 (2018).  She is also working to develop robust methods for fabricating nanostructures that can host topologically protected excitations that would enable the development of new types of electronic components with lower dissipation [V. Kornich et al., Phys. Rev. B 101, 125414 (2020), B. Thorgrimsson et al., J. Appl. Phys. 127, 215102 (2020).]. Her past work has yielded new understanding of complex materials that include biominerals [e.g., P. Gilbert et al., JACS 130, 17519 (2008)], quantum magnets [e.g., S. Ghosh et al., Nature 425, 48 (2003)], and granular matter [e.g., C.-h. Liu et al., Science 269, 513-515 (1995)].

• Andrew Dzurak, UNSW, Australia

Andrew Dzurak is an expert in silicon-based quantum computing. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge (UK) and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Sydney.  He is a Scientia Professor at UNSW-Sydney, an ARC Laureate Fellow, and is Director of ANFF-NSW (http://www.anff-nsw.org), the NSW node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility. Andrew was a key participant two decades ago in the establishment of the ARC Centre for Quantum Computer Technology by Professor Bob Clark, which now maintains the world’s largest focused collaboration on silicon-based quantum computing. Andrew, with colleague Andrea Morello, demonstrated the world’s first silicon quantum bits (qubits) in 2012, and more recently developed a new qubit technology by reconfiguring the ubiquitous CMOS transistors that make up all of today’s silicon processor chips. He leads a team at UNSW focused on the development of a quantum processor that can be manufactured using CMOS technology which is funded by the Australian Research Council, the US Army Research Office and UNSW-Sydney. He has published over 200 research papers including 15 papers in Science and Nature group journals, and is co-inventor on 12 patent families. Andrew received the 2011 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research, and his silicon qubit work was selected by Physics World, UK as one of the world’s Top Ten Scientific Breakthroughs for 2015.

• Emily Edwards, IQUIST, USA

Emily Edwards is the Executive Director of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her background is in physics and science communication. In addition to co-leading the development of the QIS Key Concepts in 2020, she is co-leading the NSF-funded Q2Work program, which is facilitating the National Q-12 Education Partnership. She also has an NSF AISL project to develop an online multimedia glossary of quantum physics terms called “The Quantum Atlas.” 

• Mark Eriksson, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA

Mark A. Eriksson is the John Bardeen Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He received a B.S. with honors in physics and mathematics in 1992 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an A.M. (1994) and Ph.D. (1997) in physics from Harvard University.  His Ph.D. thesis demonstrated the first cryogenic scanned-gate measurements of a semiconductor nanostructure.  He was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1997-1999, where he studied ultra-low-density electron systems.  Eriksson joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at UW-Madison in 1999.  His research has focused on quantum computing, semiconductor quantum dots, and nanoscience.  With collaborators he demonstrated the first quantum dot in silicon/silicon-germanium occupied by an individual electron and performed the first experiments to demonstrate the quantum dot hybrid qubit.  Eriksson currently leads a multi-university team focused on the development of spin qubits in gate-defined silicon quantum dots. A goal of this work is to enable quantum computers, which manipulate information coherently, to be built using many of the materials and fabrication methods that are the foundation of modern, classical integrated circuits.  Eriksson was elected fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015.

• Travis Humble, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA

Travis Humble is Deputy Director at the Department of Energy’s Quantum Science Center, a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and director of the lab’s Quantum Computing Institute, leading the development of new quantum technologies and infrastructure to impact the DOE mission of scientific discovery through quantum computing. Travis is editor-in-chief for ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing, Associate Editor for Quantum Information Processing, and co-chair of the IEEE Quantum Initiative. Travis also holds a joint faculty appointment with the University of Tennessee Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education to work with students in developing energy-efficient computing solutions. Travis received a doctorate in theoretical chemistry from the University of Oregon before joining ORNL in 2005.

• Robert Joynt, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA

Robert Joynt received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1982 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH-Zurich.  Since 1986, he has been Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has served as Department Chair and Associate Director of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.  His research has ranged from the quantum Hall effect to high-Tc superconductivity. 

Since 2002, he has researched in the field of quantum computing, covering many aspects of the subject: semiconductor and superconductor implementations, geometry and topology of quantum correlations, quantum algorithms for the graph isomorphism problem and quantum random walks.  At present he is researching ways to speed up the quantum adiabatic algorithm, decoherence from evanescent-wave Johnson noise, and new designs for qubit devices.

Prof. Joynt is the founder and director of the MSc program in Quantum Computing at UW-Madison.  This is the first degree program in quantum computing in the US.  The first class has just matriculated.

• Andrew King, D-Wave, Canada

Andrew King is Director, Performance Research at D-Wave Systems, which he joined in 2013.  He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at McGill University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and Simon Fraser University.  His background is in graph theory and discrete algorithms, and his current research focus is on performance analysis and applications of quantum annealing, with a focus on quantum simulation.

• Ferdinand Kuemmeth, QDev/Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Ferdinand Kuemmeth is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and CTO of QDevil ApS. He obtained his PhD in 2007 at Cornell University under guidance of Prof. Dan Ralph, where he discovered spin-orbit coupling in carbon nanotubes. After his postdoc with Prof. Charles Marcus at Harvard University he moved to Copenhagen (2012), where he leads experiments on semiconducting spin qubits within the Center for Quantum Devices. 

• Jeremy Levy, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Dr. Jeremy Levy is a Distinguished Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Founding Director of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute (http://pqi.org).  He received an A.B. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1988, and a Ph.D. degree in physics from UC Santa Barbara in 1993.  After a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, he joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1996.  His research interests center around the emerging field of oxide nanoelectronics, experimental and theoretical realizations for quantum computation, semiconductor and oxide spintronics, quantum transport and nanoscale optics, and dynamical phenomena in oxide materials and films.  He is a Class of 2015 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow, a Fellow of the APS and AAAS, a recipient of the 2008 Nano50 Innovator Award, and the NSF Career Award.  He has received the University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor’s Distinguished awards for research (2004, 2011) and teaching (2007).  

• Catherine McGeoch, D-Wave, Canada

Catherine McGeoch received her doctorate in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987 and taught at Amherst College for almost 30 years. In 2014 she traded academia for industry and joined the technical staff of D-Wave Systems. 

Her research focus is on empirical analysis of algorithms and heuristics, and more recently on performance evaluation of quantum algorithms and quantum computing systems.  She was co-founder of the DIMACS Implementation Challenges and SIAM’s ALENEX meetings on algorithm engineering and experimentation; and she is past editor in chief of the ACM Journal on Experimental Algorithmics.  She has authored two books, one on experimental algorithmics, and one on adiabatic quantum computation and quantum annealing.

• Christopher Monroe, Duke University/IonQ

Christopher Monroe is an experimental quantum physicist and engineer, with interests in developing and building full-stack quantum computers. He is Director of the Duke Quantum Center and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Duke University.  Monroe specializes in the isolation and control of individual atoms as quantum computer elements. At NIST in the 1990s, Monroe led the team along with David Wineland that demonstrated the first quantum logic gate in any platform. Since then, Monroe’s research group has pioneered all aspects of trapped atomic ion based quantum computers, making the first steps toward a scalable, reconfigurable, and modular quantum computer system. Monroe is also co-founder and Chief Scientist at IonQ, a company leading the way in the fabrication of full-stack quantum computers. (IonQ was recently listed on the NYSE, as the first pure-play public quantum computing company, with a $2B market capitalization.) Monroe is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is one of the key architects of the recent U.S. National Quantum Initiative.

• Rick Muller, Sandia National Laboratories, USA

Senior Manager, Quantum and Advanced Microsystems Group

Dr. Muller is the Senior Manager of the Quantum and Advanced Microsystem group at Sandia and manages the Sandia portfolio in Quantum Information Science. Rick is also Deputy Director of the Quantum Systems Accelerator, one of the five DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, which is co-led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Sandia, and includes collaborators at Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Duke, Berkeley, and other institutions.

Rick came to Sandia in 2003, after serving as a director of the Materials and Science Simulation Center at Caltech, which followed a postdoctoral fellowship with Nobelist Arieh Warshel at the University of Southern California and doctoral work with Bill Goddard at Caltech, all in Computational Chemistry. Rick did his undergraduate work in Chemistry at Rice University and the University of Oxford.

Prior to joining MESA, Rick was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in the Center for Computing Research, working in electronic structure theory and quantum device modeling and a manager in the Material, Physical, and Chemical Science Center. Rick spent 2016-2017 in Washington, D.C., working for the National Strategic Computing Initiative.

Rick was raised near Chicago, IL, and when not at work enjoys biking and hiking on New Mexico trails, and spending time with his wife, Tess, and son, Alex.

• Andrea Morello, UNSW, Australia

Andrea Morello is the Scientia Professor of Quantum Engineering at UNSW Sydney (Australia), and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 2004, followed by a postdoc at the University of British Columbia. His group at UNSW has pioneered the use of donor spins for quantum information processing, demonstrating the first electron and nuclear spin qubits in silicon. For these contributions he received numerous awards, including the 2017 Landauer and Bennett Award for Quantum Computing. His interests further extend to quantum chaos, quantum foundations and quantum sensing.

• William Oliver, MIT/Lincoln Laboratory

William D. Oliver is jointly appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics, and Lincoln Laboratory Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He serves as the Director of the Center for Quantum Engineering and as Associate Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Will’s research interests include the materials growth, fabrication, design, and measurement of superconducting qubits, as well as the development of cryogenic packaging and control electronics.

Will is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Senior Member of the IEEE, serves on the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee and the US Committee for Superconducting Electronics, and is an IEEE Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC) Board Member. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Stanford University in 2003.

• Kiera Peltz, Qubit by Qubit, USA

Kiera Peltz, Qubit by Qubit Founder, is on a mission to train the next generation for the jobs of the future today. She began learning how to code while she was working on the White House’s Innovation & Technology team. She is a Gates-Cambridge and Schwarzman Scholar, receiving master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge and Tsinghua University in Sociology and Economics & Business, respectively. Kiera graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a double major in Political Science and Happiness, an independent major she designed that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of happy societies.

Qubit by Qubit is the online learning initiative of The Coding School, a 501(c)(3) organization that aims to empower the next generation through computer science education. The Coding School has grown into an international organization with 800+ instructors and students from over 40 countries participating in its programs. To ensure that its programming and teaching is of the highest quality, Qubit by Qubit has partnered with a number of internationally-renowned educational institutions, including: UCLA, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Brown University, and Villanova University.

• Jason Petta, Princeton University, USA

Jason Petta is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He received a PhD in physics from Cornell University in 2003. Petta’s early work focused on spectroscopy of quantum states in metallic quantum dots. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard in the group of Charlie Marcus, Petta played a leading role in a series of experiments demonstrating trapping and detection of single electrons, as well as a seminal experiment demonstrating coherent control of two-electron spin states. Since moving to Princeton in 2007, Petta’s research group has developed quantum devices in silicon. Recent advances include the fabrication of a scalable quantum dot device architecture in silicon, shuttling a single charge down an array of silicon quantum dots, and the demonstration of a high fidelity two qubit gate for spins in silicon. In a related series of experiments, Petta’s group has developed hybrid quantum devices incorporating semiconducting and superconducting elements. Physics breakthroughs include the demonstration of strong coupling of a single charge to a single photon, strong coupling of a single spin to a single photon, and in 2020 long-range coupling of two spins separated by 4 mm using microwave frequency photons.

Professor Petta is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the McMillan Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Newcomb Cleveland prize, and the Lee-Osheroff- Richardson prize. Petta was a Moore Foundation Experimental Investigator in Quantum Materials from 2014 to 2020. Petta was recently elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

• Emily Pritchett, IBM, USA

Emily Pritchett is an IBM Research Staff Member responsible for numerical modeling of superconducting quantum devices. She has been at IBM since 2019, before which she researched semiconductor device physics at HRL Laboratories for 5 years. She completed her PhD in 2010 under supervisor Michael Geller at the University of Georgia, after which she was a postdoctoral fellow supervised by Frank Wilhelm at the University of Waterloo Institute for Quantum Computing and Saarland University.

• Charles Robinson, IBM, USA

Charles has over 30 years’ experience in engineering, and management in the Public Sector.  Charles started his career in the United States Navy and has been a “Mission First” transformational leader with demonstrated record in planning and leading corporations that drive growth, contribute profitability, and increase share within the Public Sector. In his current role as IBM Quantum Computing Public Sector leader, he is responsible for preparing the Defense Community for the Quantum Computer Age. Charles also drove the formation of the IBM HBCU Quantum Computer Program.  Charles previously managed the Defense & Intelligence business for IBM. Charles graduated from Howard University and Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor & Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Charles volunteer experience include the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) Workforce TAC Vice Chair, Maryland Quantum Alliance (MQA) D&EI Co-Chair, and the MQA Crypto working group Co-Chair.

• Christopher Savoie, Zapata Computing, USA

Christopher Savoie (URI Class of ’92) is the CEO of Zapata Computing, a Harvard spinout quantum computing software and algorithm company funded by The Engine, the venture firm founded by MIT to invest in tough tech. Dr. Savoie is a published scholar in medicine, biochemistry and computer science and his research and business interests over the years have focused on the intersection of machine learning, biology, and chemistry. Dr. Savoie serves on the Steering Committee for the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) and is the original inventor of AAOSA, the A.I.-based natural language interface technology that was used to develop Apple’s Siri.

Dr. Savoie has led big data analytics efforts at Nissan and has previously founded and served as CEO of technology companies that have been acquired or exited via IPO. Dr. Savoie is also a licensed attorney and is current chair of the QED-C Quantum Law Technical Advisory Committee. Savoie is a published legal expert on liability issues surrounding Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Information Security and Data Privacy and has lectured and taught continuing legal education courses on these subjects.

• Michelle Simmons, UNSW, Australia

Professor Michelle Simmons is Director of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. She has pioneered unique technologies internationally to build electronic devices in silicon at the atomic scale, including the world’s smallest transistor, the narrowest conducting wires, 3D atomic electronics and the first two qubit gate using atom-based qubits in silicon. As founder of Silicon Quantum Computing Pty Ltd, her team is at the forefront of developing a silicon-based quantum computer. Michelle is one of a handful of researchers in Australia to have twice received an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship and now a Laureate Fellowship. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the American Association of the Advancement of Science, the UK Institute of Physics, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and the Australian Academy of Science.

In 2018 Professor Simmons was named Australian of the Year, one of the nation’s pre-eminent awards.

• Stephanie Simmons, Simon Fraser University/Photonic, Inc., Canada

Dr. Stephanie Simmons is an Assistant Professor, Canada Research Chair, and CIFAR Fellow, based out of the Department of Physics at Simon Fraser University (SFU), and is the Founder and Chief Quantum Officer of Photonic Inc. Her work on silicon quantum technologies was awarded a Physics World Top Ten Breakthrough of the Year of 2013 and again in 2015, and she is one of only 5 individuals to have ever won this award twice. She was named one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 for 2020, and her work has been covered by the New York Times, CBC, BBC, Scientific American, the New Scientist, and many others.

• Chandralekha Singh, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Chandralekha Singh is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Founding Director of the Discipline-Based Science Education Research Center (dB-SERC) at the University of Pittsburgh. She served as the 2020-21 President of the American Association of Physics Teachers. She obtained her bachelors and masters degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and her Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of California Santa Barbara. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, before joining the University of Pittsburgh. She has been conducting research in physics education for more than two decades. She co-led the US team to the International Conference on Women in Physics in Birmingham UK in 2017. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Association of Physics Teachers.

• Corey Stambaugh, OSTP, USA

Corey Stambaugh is the Senior Policy Advisor and Industrial Liaison for the National Quantum Coordination Office at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he leads activities around workforce development and industry engagement for QIS. He is currently on detail from the National Institute of Standards and Technology where he is a staff physicist in the Quantum Measurement Division. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Florida and a B.Sc. in physics with a minor in Computer Science from the Ohio State University. Corey has co-authored more than 40 papers on a variety of topics focused around precision measurement, micro-fabricated devices, and mass metrology. As a NSF International Postdoctoral Fellow, he carried out research at Seoul National University in South Korea. Corey is a past NIST-NRC Postdoctoral Research Associate and recipient of the NIST Allen V. Astin Measurement Science Award. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Physics at Montgomery College.

• Charles Tahan, OSTP/Laboratory for Physical Sciences, USA (Roundtable Keynote Speaker)

Dr. Charles Tahan is the Assistant Director for Quantum Information Science (QIS) and the Director of the National Quantum Coordination Office (NQCO) within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The NQCO ensures coordination of the National Quantum Initiative (NQI) and QIS activities across the federal government, industry, and academia.

Dr. Tahan is on detail from the Laboratory for Physical Sciences where he drove technical progress in the future of information technology as Technical Director. Research at LPS spans computing, communications, and sensing, from novel device physics to high-performance computer architectures. As a technical lead, Dr. Tahan stood up new research initiatives in silicon and superconducting quantum computing; quantum characterization, verification, and validation; and new and emerging qubit science and technology. As a practicing physicist, he is Chief of the intramural QIS research programs at LPS and works with students and postdocs from the University of Maryland-College Park to conduct original research in quantum information and device theory. His contributions have been recognized by the Researcher of the Year Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and as an ODNI Science and Technology Fellow. He continues to serve as Chief Scientist of LPS and Chief, Quantum Information Science.

Dr. Tahan earned a PhD in Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 and a B.Sc. in Physics and Computer Science with Highest Honors from the College of William & Mary in 2000. From 2005-2007 he was a National Science Foundation Distinguished International Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK; the Center for Quantum Computing Technology, Australia; and the University of Tokyo, Japan. He served as chief technical consultant for quantum information science and technology programs in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) while at Booz Allen Hamilton from 2007-2009. He has a long-term commitment to science and society including creating one of the first games meant to build intuition about quantum computing.

• Jake Taylor, NIST/University of Maryland/JQI/QuICS, USA (Opening Keynote Speaker)

Jake Taylor served as the Assistant Director for Quantum Information Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where he helped conceive, implement, and lead the National Quantum Initiative from 2017-2020. He is the co-founder of and a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), and a NIST Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In addition to publishing pioneering research in quantum information science over two decades, he was a TAPP Fellow at the Belfer Center for 2020-2021, where he examined methods for integrating public purpose into the development of emerging technology. Taylor is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Optica and recipient of the Department of Commerce Gold and Silver Medals, the IUPAP C15 Young Scientist Award, the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal: Call to Service, the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering, and the Newcomb Cleveland prize of the AAAS.

• Lieven Vandersypen, TU Delft, Netherlands

Prof. Dr. ir Lieven Vandersypen is Antoni van Leeuwenhoek professor in Quantum Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology and Scientific Director of QuTech, an advanced research centre for Quantum Computing and Quantum Internet. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (2001) for the first experiments in quantum computing, under supervision of Ike Chuang. He then joined Leo Kouwenhoven as a postdoc at TU Delft, where he started his own group in 2003. He is a pioneer in single-spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots, for applications in quantum computing and quantum simulation. He received Starting, Synergy and Advanced grants of the European Research Council. He is a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW), received the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize for Semiconductor Physics and the Nicholas Kurti European Science Prize, as well as the Spinoza Prize, which is the highest scientific award in the Netherlands.

• Umesh Vazirani, UC Berkeley, USA (Cruickshank Lecturer)

Umesh Vazirani is Strauch Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and Director of the Berkeley Quantum Computing Center (BQIC). His 1993 paper with Ethan Bernstein laid the foundations of quantum complexity theory, and his research has touched on many facets of quantum computation, including Quantum Algorithms, Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity and Interactive classical testing of quantum devices. Vazirani is co-inventor of the Bid Scaling algorithm for the AdWords auction which is widely used by Internet search companies, and co-winner of the Fulkerson Prize for the ARV graph partitioning algorithm. He is member of the NAS, and co-author of two books: An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory (MIT Press) and Algorithms (McGraw-Hill).

• Amir Yacoby, Harvard, USA

Amir Yacoby is a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He is also a Professor of Applied Physics at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and a visiting Professor at the University of Waterloo. He currently holds the Lazaridis Chair in Physics.

Following a bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering and a master’s degree in theoretical physics, Professor Yacoby turned to experimental condensed matter physics. He received his PhD in 1994 from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. His work focused on understanding coherence in quantum mesoscopic systems. During his postdoc at Bell labs Professor Yacoby developed new techniques to explore electrical conduction in quantum wires and was the first to observe spin-charge separation, a hallmark of Luttinger Liquids. In 1998 Professor Yacoby joined the faculty of the Weizmann Institute where he developed new techniques for imaging electrical charge in mesoscopic systems.

Professor Yacoby joined the Harvard faculty in 2006. His current interests are in understanding the behavior of correlated electrons in low-dimensional systems and their applications to quantum information technology and metrology. His research topics include: spin based quantum computing and metrology using semiconducting quantum dots and color centers in diamond; topological quantum computing using two dimensional topological insulators; and interacting electrons in graphene multilayers and transition metal dichalcogenides.

In March 2014, his group developed a magnetic resonance imaging technology by which nanoscale images can be provided, that could enable researchers to peer into atomic structure of individual molecules. In 2014, Yacoby was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

• Christopher Lirakis, IBM, USA

A native Rhode Islander, Dr. Lirakis received his PhD in High Energy physics in 1989 from Northeastern University. During his thesis work and as a post-doc he worked on the development and deployment of large scale particle detectors. After leaving the high energy physics field, Dr. Lirakis became interested in the newer field of quantum information. His initial work started on the metropolitan scale quantum key distribution with BBN Technologies. He moved on the help BBN enter the quantum computation development. While there he formed a partnership with IBM.  He later made the transition from BBN to IBM and has helped the IBM team grow.

Dr. Lirakis is currently a research staff member in the IBM Quantum team. His current responsibility is to lead worldwide deployments of quantum processors. He is also responsible for helping to guide a global hardware ecosystem focused on economic development around quantum hardware. He has been a part of the IBM team since 2012.