Quantum Information

Elham Kashefi (FRSE) is a Professor of Quantum Computing at the University of Edinburgh and CNRS Director of Research at Sorbonne Universite and NQCC Chief scientist. She has pioneered transdisciplinary research on the structure, behaviour, and interactions of quantum technology, from formal and foundational aspects all the way to actual industrial use-case delivery (co-founder of VeriQloud). Kashefi's research team innovates across a broad range of platforms (photonic, superconducting, ion trap) with an integrated software research programme (simulation, modelling and benchmarking) delivering impact in quantum computing (machine learning, cryptanalysis) and quantum networks (quantum cryptography, quantum cloud computing) in a certifiable way (provable security and verification of computation).

John G. Rarity FRS is a leading expert in quantum technologies at the University of Bristol where he has been a professor since 2003 and acting as director of QET Labs and Photonics and Quantum group 2017-Dec 2020. He is an international expert on quantum optics, communications and sensing exploiting single photons and entanglement. He pioneered early experiments in path entanglement, quantum key distribution and quantum metrology. In recent years he has worked on quantum technologies applied to low cost consumer key sharing, long rang key sharing to satellites, chip scale multiphoton quantum information processing and quantum enhanced rangefinding and remote gas sensing. In recognition of his early work in quantum optics he was awarded the 1994 IOP Thomas young medal and for his early quantum communications work he was recently awarded the 2023 Micius prize.

Jian-Wei Pan, born on 11 March 1970, received his Bachelor (1992) and Master (1995) in Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and his PhD (1999) from the University of Vienna. He is currently a Professor of Physics of the USTC, an Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Jian-Wei Pan’s research fields focus on quantum foundations, quantum optics and quantum information. He has authored more than 400 articles which have attracted more than 73000 citations (Google scholar). Pan has won First Prize of National Prize for Natural Sciences of China, Future Science Prize in Physical Sciences, Willis E. Lamb Award, Newcomb Cleveland Prize form American Association for the Advancement of Science, R. W. Wood Prize from Optical Society of America, Micius Quantum Prize and Zeiss Research Award, and was selected by Nature as “people of the year” in 2017 who “took quantum communication to space and back”.

Martin Dawson is professor and director of research at the University of Strathclyde’s Institute of Photonics, which he helped establish almost 25 years ago. Since 2012 he has also been the inaugural Head of the Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics (Fraunhofer CAP) in Glasgow. Martin has contributed broadly to laser and semiconductor research including ultrafast lasers, optically-pumped semiconductor lasers, diamond photonics and micro-LEDs, the latter of which is now emerging globally as a new form of commercial display technology. He holds fellowships of the IEEE, OSA, Institute of Physics and Royal Society of Edinburgh, and he has been awarded the Dennis Gabor Medal and Prize of the IOP and the Aron Kressel Award of the IEEE.

John G. Rarity FRS is a leading expert in quantum technologies at the University of Bristol where he has been a professor since 2003 and acting as director of QET Labs and Photonics and Quantum group 2017-Dec 2020. He is an international expert on quantum optics, communications and sensing exploiting single photons and entanglement. He pioneered early experiments in path entanglement, quantum key distribution and quantum metrology. In recent years he has worked on quantum technologies applied to low cost consumer key sharing, long rang key sharing to satellites, chip scale multiphoton quantum information processing and quantum enhanced rangefinding and remote gas sensing. In recognition of his early work in quantum optics he was awarded the 1994 IOP Thomas young medal and for his early quantum communications work he was recently awarded the 2023 Micius prize.

Gerard Milburn obtained a PhD in theoretical Physics from the University of Waikato in 1982. In 1994 he was appointed Professor in Physics at The University of Queensland. He is currently a Fellow at The National Quantum Computing Centre, UK and the University of Sussex.  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. Gerard Milburn is a Fellow of the Royal Society, 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).

Jonathan Matthews is a Professor of Quantum Photonics and Co-Director of The Quantum Engineering and Technology Laboratories at the University of Bristol, where he leads a quantum enhanced sensing activity. His early research efforts focused on integrated quantum photonics, e.g. silica waveguides to control photonic quantum states for primitive quantum information demonstrators and higher refractive index contrast waveguide arrays for multi-photon quantum walks. His current efforts focus on discrete and continuous variables strategies to perform quantum sensing and imaging, and the development of CV capabilities in silicon photonics.  His research is supported by an EPSRC early career fellowship, an ERC starting grant and the Quantic quantum-imaging hub.

Helena Knowles is Assistant Professor and Royal Society Research Fellow at the Department of Physics, University of Cambridge.
 
Helena leads a research group focused on quantum control and on quantum imaging at the nanometre scale. Her group applies quantum diamond sensors to biomedically relevant questions, and explores the opportunities for revealing many-body quantum phenomena in complex spin-based systems. She co-leads the Cambridge Nanoscale Quantum Sensing and Imaging Suite (CANSIS).
 
In 2014 she was awarded a Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge. She then moved to Harvard as a Research Associate in 2017, before joining the Cambridge Faculty in 2019. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and a MSc from ETH Zurich.

Alessandro Fedrizzi has spent the past 20 years pioneering photonic quantum technologies for both foundational research and applications in quantum computing, communication, and sensing. He completed his PhD in 2008 under Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger and then conducted seven years of research as a fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. He joined Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh in 2015, where he is now a professor in the Institute of Photonics & Quantum Sciences. Alessandro's work focuses on advancing quantum light sources for applications in quantum networking and satellite-based quantum communication. He is a co-director of the Integrated Quantum Networks (IQN) Hub (IQN) and the EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Applied Quantum Technologies.

Miles Padgett is a Royal Society Research Professor and also holds the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

His research team covers all things optical, from the basic ways in which light behaves as it pushes and twists the world around us, to the application of new optical techniques in imaging and sensing. They are currently using the classical and quantum properties of light to explore: the laws of quantum physics in accelerating frames, microscopes that see through noise, shaped light that overcomes diffraction-limited resolution and endoscopes the width of a human hair.

He is a Fellow both of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society, in addition to subject specialist societies. He has won various national and international prizes (see below) including, in 2019, the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society and in 2021 the Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize of the European Physical Society. Since 2019 he has been identified by Web of Science as a globally highly-cited researcher.

Prof Leigh Lapworth is a Rolls-Royce Engineering Fellow specialising in Computational Science with over 30 years’ experience of developing and applying physics-based simulation using High Performance Supercomputers. He led the development of the Rolls-Royce corporate CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). Other previous roles include Chief Design Systems Architect and Head of Computational Science. He has led several successful industrial-academic collaborative research projects. The most recent being a pre-exascale EPSRC Prosperity Partnership. Leigh leads the Rolls-Royce Quantum Computing initiative. To date this includes three Innovate UK co-funded projects and a small portfolio of directly funded projects with national and international partners. These focus on algorithms for error corrected computers and the hybrid classical-quantum interface.

Leigh is a Chartered Mathematician and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and an Honorary Professorial Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Warwick.

Ashley has worked in the field of quantum computing for 20 years, specialising in quantum algorithms and quantum computational complexity, and has published over 50 papers on this topic. He holds a PhD in quantum computing from the University of Bristol and is Professor of Quantum Computation there. Ashley was awarded a Whitehead Prize in 2017 by the London Mathematical Society and was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2018. He has served on the Steering Committee of the international conference on Quantum Information Processing (QIP), was a Founding Editor of the journal Quantum, and was a cofounder of the Quantum Computing Theory in Practice conference series. Ashley cofounded Phasecraft with Toby Cubitt and John Morton to develop breakthrough quantum algorithms to get the most out of near-term quantum computers..

Michael is the founding Director of the National Quantum Computing Centre based at Harwell in Oxfordshire. With a background in superconductivity and cryogenic systems, prior to joining NQCC, Michael had a number of technical and commercial leadership roles with Oxford Instruments in Japan, the US and the UK, most recently as Head of Quantum Technologies. Michael is a member of the Institute of Physics and sits on several advisory panels, including the NQTP Programme Board, NPL Science & Technology Advisory Council, CORNERSTONE External Advisory Board and Cancer Research UK Research Data Advisory Board. Michael is Aegis Professor in Quantum Technologies at the University of Bristol.

Professor Jennifer Hastie is Director of the Institute of Photonics at the University of Strathclyde, an applied research unit and cost centre within the Department of Physics with more than 70 staff and postgraduate students conducting research in Advanced Lasers, Photonic Integration and Devices, Neurophotonics, and Optical Wireless Communications. She leads the Institute’s research in high brightness lasers with a primary interest in meeting the challenging laser performance requirements for cutting-edge applications in metrology and quantum technology, and from 2014-2024 she was on the Management Board of the National Quantum Technology Hub for Sensing & Timing. She is Deputy Principal Investigator of the EPSRC-funded programmes the Photonics & Quantum Accelerator and the National Hub for Quantum Enabled Position, Navigation, and Timing. In 2023 she was elected a Fellow of Optica for “leadership in the photonics and quantum technology community and pioneering technical contributions in the area of narrow-linewidth lasers.”

Jim Al-Khalili CBE FRS HonFREng is an academic, author, broadcaster and well-known science communicator. He is currently Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey where he continues his research in open quantum systems, the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum biology. Along with around 150 peer-reviewed research papers, he has written fifteen books, between them translated into over twenty-six languages. His book on Medieval Arabic Science, Pathfinders, was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize latest book, and his 2020 book, The World According to Physics, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. He is currently writing a popular science book on the nature of time. As a broadcaster, he is a regular presenter of TV science documentaries, such as Atom, Shock and Awe: the Story of Electricity and the Bafta nominated Chemistry: a volatile history. He is probably best-known in the UK for his long-running BBC Radio 4 programme, The Life Scientific.  Jim is a past president of both the British Science Association and Humanists UK and is a recipient of the Royal Society Michael Faraday medal and the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar medal, the Institute of Physics Kelvin Medal and the Stephen Hawking medal and has received honorary doctorates from nine UK universities. He is a trustee and commissioner on the board of the 1851 Royal Commission and a Fellow of the Science Museums Group.

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and How Life Works. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball was the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He lives in London.

Since 2018 Roger McKinlay has been leading the Quantum Technologies Challenge in Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation. The QT Challenge funds collaborative projects and has committed over £200m to industry-led projects over the past five years. Roger is a Chartered Engineer and a past president of the Royal Institute of Navigation. He joined UKRI following a career in the defence and aerospace industries. 

Elham Kashefi (FRSE) is a Professor of Quantum Computing at the University of Edinburgh and CNRS Director of Research at Sorbonne Universite and NQCC Chief scientist. She has pioneered transdisciplinary research on the structure, behaviour, and interactions of quantum technology, from formal and foundational aspects all the way to actual industrial use-case delivery (co-founder of VeriQloud). Kashefi's research team innovates across a broad range of platforms (photonic, superconducting, ion trap) with an integrated software research programme (simulation, modelling and benchmarking) delivering impact in quantum computing (machine learning, cryptanalysis) and quantum networks (quantum cryptography, quantum cloud computing) in a certifiable way (provable security and verification of computation).