Scientific Advisory Committee
David Cory
PhD
Professor Cory is the principal investigator for the Canada First Research Excellence Fund Transformative Quantum Technologies (‘TQT’) program with the Institute for Quantum Computing (‘IQC’) at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as IQC deputy director. From 2010 to 2017, Prof. Cory held the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Information Processing. He was an Associate at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics and from 1992 to 2010 was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prof. Cory and his research team explore the experimental challenges of building small quantum processors. His group is a diverse team with researchers from engineering, science, and math working together. The quantum processors they are developing are based on nuclear spins, electron spins, neutrons, persistent current superconducting devices, and optics. Prof. Cory has over 300 publications, in addition to many patents and patent applications. Prof. Cory received a PhD from the Case Western Reserve University in 1987 and a BA from Case Western Reserve University in 1981.
Michal Lipson
PhD
Professor Michal Lipson is the Eugene Higgins Professor at Columbia University. She graduated from Technion, Israel in 1992 with a BS in Physics, followed by a MS in Physics in 1994 and a PhD in Physics in 1998 from the same university. Prof. Lipson pioneered critical building blocks in the field of Silicon Photonics, which today is recognized as one of the most promising directions for solving the major bottlenecks in microelectronics. She is the inventor of over 30 issued patents and has co-authored more than 200 scientific publications. She was awarded the NAS Comstock Prize in Physics, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Blavatnik Award, the Optical Society’s R. W. Wood Prize, the IEEE Photonics Award, and has received an honourary degree from Trinity College, University of Dublin. Every year since 2014 she has been named by Thomson Reuters as a top 1% highly cited researcher in the field of Physics. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Alexandre Blais
PhD
Professor Blais is the Scientific Director of the Institut quantique and a member of the Université de Sherbrooke physics department. In 2014, he was appointed to the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, which was established to gather the emerging generation of artistic and scientific leadership seeking to advance knowledge and enrich society. Prof. Blais’ work involves the development of circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit “QED”), which is considered one of the most promising architectures for creating a quantum computer. His research interests include understanding how to control the quantum states of mesoscopic devices and applying the theoretical tools of quantum optics to engineered quantum systems. Globally renowned for his expertise, Prof. Blais was the 2018 recipient of the Rutherford Memorial Medal of the Royal Society of Canada. The same year, he was appointed Fellow of the American Physical Society.
