Gerard Milburn obtained a PhD in theoretical Physics from the University of Waikato in 1982 for work on squeezed states of light and quantum non demolition measurements. In 1994 he was appointed Professor in Physics at The University of Queensland. In 2011 he became the founding Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems.

He has worked in the fields of quantum optics, quantum stochastic processes, atom optics, quantum control and most recently in engineered quantum systems including opto mechanics and superconducting quantum circuits. In 2001, together with Knill and Laflamme he published a scheme for quantum computing with photons, known as the KLM scheme, that had a major impact on the experiments in quantum optics.

Gerard Milburn is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the American Physical Society. He is the author of five books including Quantum Optics (with Dan Walls), Quantum Measurement and Control (with Howard Wiseman) and Quantum Opto mechanics (with Warwick Bowen).