We are Quantinuum

Bob Coecke is Chief Scientist at Cambridge Quantum and Quantinuum, where he also heads the Oxford-based Quantum Natural Language Processing team, and Emeritus Professor at Wolfson College, Oxford University. Previously, he was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, where he was for 20 years, and co-founded, built, and led a multi-disciplinary research group of up to 50 people. Professor Coecke supervised 66 PhD students. 

Professor Coecke pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now in AMS’s MSC2020 classification), ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, mathematical foundations for resource theories, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and is co-author of Picturing Quantum Processes, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. Professor Coecke co-authored close to 200 research papers. He is a founding father of the QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) and ACT (Applied Category Theory) communities, and of the diamond-open-access journal Compositionality. He was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as part of his professorial title. His work is headlined in various media outlets including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly.

Patty Lee is the Chief Scientist of Hardware Technology Development at Quantinuum and leads the technology development for commercial trapped-ion quantum computers. Her team is pursuing scalable trapped-ion technology and delivering commercial quantum computers with high fidelity operations and large quantum volumes. Her career in quantum computing began in graduate school at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where her thesis research advanced the understanding of phase control for geometric phase gates in trapped ions.  She has worked as an experimental physicist at NIST Gaithersburg, US Army Research Laboratory, and Lockheed Martin. While at NIST she and her colleagues implemented the first entangling gate on ultracold atomic qubits in an optical lattice as well as site-dependent addressing of atomic qubits. She has published many well-cited peer-reviewed articles on quantum information processing with trapped ions and with neutral atoms.  She has also given numerous presentations and invited talks and chaired sessions at DAMOP, CLEO, and other scientific conferences.

Prior to joining Cambridge Quantum as Head of AI, Stephen Clark spent 14 years as a Member of Faculty at the Departments of Computer Science of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, including 4 years as a Tutorial Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. From 2016 to 2020 he was a Research Scientist at DeepMind in London, acting as a Team Lead for the research area of Grounded Language Learning.

He was awarded an Oxford University Teaching Award (2007), and a prestigious 1M Euro ERC Starting Grant (2012–2017) to investigate compositional distributional models of meaning. He also coordinated a £1.5M 5-site EPSRC grant on the same topic.

Professor Clark has been an external examiner for 25+ PhDs and has supervised 10+ PhD students at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as 40+ masters and final-year undergraduate projects. He was the Chair of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011–2015), and the Program Co-Chair of the 2010 annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

He has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research; Action Editor for Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics; and Editorial Board member for the journals Computational Linguistics, Computer Speech and Language and the Journal of Natural Language Engineering.

Professor Clark holds an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Gonville and Caius College). He obtained an MSc in Cognitive Science at the University of Manchester (Department of Computer Science) and a PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex (School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences). He is currently an Honorary Professor at Queen Mary University of London.

Ross Duncan leads Quantum Software at Cambridge Quantum and holds honorary positions at the University of Strathclyde and University College London. He obtained his Doctorate from Oxford University in 2006 for his thesis “Types for Quantum Computation”. Since then, he has held positions as an EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, Chargé de Recherche at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Lecturer of Computer Science at the University of Strathclyde. His research focusses on the foundations of quantum computing and, in particular, on the use of category theory and diagrammatic calculi to better understand the structure of quantum states and programs; he is the co-inventor (with Professor Bob Coecke) of the ZX-calculus and has applied this to reason about quantum circuits, measurement-based quantum computation, and quantum error correcting codes. Since joining Cambridge Quantum in 2018 he has focussed on the development of Tket, a platform-independent optimising compiler and software development framework for near-term quantum computers.

Dr. Mattia Fiorentini leads Cambridge Quantum’s development of high-impact applications of near-term quantum hardware. His work on quantum algorithms is aimed at developing innovative techniques for machine learning, optimization, and simulation problems. His team’s research is published regularly in top-tier scientific journals and is centred around robust and scalable Quantum Machine Learning. Mattia and his team deploy their proprietary algorithms and know-how to tackle the most pressing technical challenges of industry leaders in Finance, Energy, Manufacturing, Logistics, and Life-sciences. Previously, Mattia gained a PhD in Theory and Simulation of Condensed Matter from King’s College London, where he researched first-principle electronic transport with high-performance computing.

Dr. David Hayes is the Theory & Architecture leader in the hardware division of Quantinuum. These two groups are responsible for designing our state-of-the-art quantum computers, identifying key performance metrics to be improved, driving new operating concepts, and studying the power of this emerging technology. David completed a PhD in experimental trapped-ion quantum computing at the University of Maryland and studied quantum memory preservation during a post-doc at the University of Sydney in Australia. David also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at the University of New Mexico.

Steven holds MA, MEng and PhD (in Computer Science) degrees from the University of Cambridge, and is something of a generalist in the broad field of information science and technology, having previous experience in statistical signal processing / data science, machine learning, information theory and network architecture & routing. He has authored numerous peer reviewed articles in leading journals, and is a co-inventor of five patents.

Prior to joining Cambridge Quantum, Steven held post-doctoral research positions at the Centre for Quantum Information and Foundations, in the University of Cambridge Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and the Quantum Group in the University of Oxford Department of Computer Science. Both positions were in conjunction with the UK National Quantum Computing Programme (NQIT), and he worked on various problems of current interest in quantum computing, including qubit routing, architecture design of networked quantum computers, efficient entanglement distribution, quantum algorithms and classical simulation of quantum circuits.  

Alongside his position at Cambridge Quantum leading Quantum Algorithms, Steven is an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology lecturing the Part II Quantum Computing course — which is the basis for a forthcoming textbook he is writing with Oxford University Press, and is a By-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.

Duncan Jones leads Quantum Cybersecurity at Cambridge Quantum. He leads a team developing advanced cybersecurity products based on quantum technology, which deliver value today. Duncan has 14 years of experience in cybersecurity, particularly in hardware security. He has held senior technical and product-focused roles across multiple global technology companies.

Dr. Chris Langer is a Fellow at Quantinuum where he serves as the chair of the Technical Board and an advisor to the President and COO. Chris is a key inventor and architect for the Quantinuum hardware. Prior to joining Quantinuum (formerly Honeywell) in 2016, Chris worked 10 years at Lockheed Martin on various projects within the Space Systems Company and the Aeronautics Company. Chris received his PhD in physics in 2006 from the University of Colorado for work on ion trap quantum computing under Nobel Laureate David Wineland.

Before joining Cambridge Quantum in January 2020 as a Research Scientist on the Quantum Machine Learning team, Michael worked as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Oxford on the development of new industry-relevant quantum algorithms and quantum-inspired tensor network algorithms. Michael has a PhD in Physics from the Technical University of Munich in Germany and carried out his PhD studies in the Theory Division of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics where his research focussed on the design of new algorithms for classical and quantum simulations. Michael studied physics at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Munich in Germany, and the main focus of his physics studies was theoretical physics and computer science.

David leads the Quantum Chemistry team, as part of the quantum software team in Cambridge. He is involved in directing the development of Cambridge Quantum's quantum chemistry software, researching new algorithms and implementing them, as well as coordinating the activities of the Quantum Chemistry team. David earned a PhD in Chemistry from the Universitat de Barcelona (Spain), with a thesis based on the development of computational chemistry methods to study magnetic solids and molecules with strong multireference character. David worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UCL and the University of Cambridge in solid state simulations applied to problems in microelectronics, geophysics, petrochemistry and heterogeneous catalysis. David is skilled in general modelling of chemistry and solid-state physics models, quantum mechanics, scientific programming and machine learning techniques.

Dr. Brian Neyenhuis is the Director of Commercial Hardware Operations for Quantinuum, where he leads a team of scientists who develop and operate Quantinuum’s commercial quantum computers. Neyenhuis did his postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland where he focused on quantum simulation and the development of new quantum technologies. Brian earned a BS in Physics at Brigham Young University and a PhD in Physics from the University of Colorado.

Steve Sanders is Senior Director of Hardware Technology Development at Quantinuum in Broomfield, Colorado. Steve has been with Quantinuum since early 2018, leading the build of a quantum computing research and development effort across a broad swath of engineering and physics disciplines. Today the Quantinuum team is rapidly pushing the state of the art in trapped-ion technology, demonstrating a trapped-ion QCCD system with quantum volume 128 in September 2020 and planning to offer progressively more powerful high-performance computing capability commercially in 2020 and beyond. Steve joined Honeywell in 1998 as a research scientist in optical sensors, where he led groups designing fiber-optic gyroscopes, inertial measurement units, and celestial navigation systems for high-performance guidance and navigation. Products of his design are currently operating at sea and in space. Steve holds a BS in engineering physics from U.C. Berkeley and a PhD in plasma physics from Caltech.

Dr. Jenni Strabley is the Senior Director of Hardware Offering Management for Quantinuum and is responsible for full life-cycle management of product offerings including the industry-leading System Model H1 technologies, Powered by Honeywell. Dr. Jenni Strabley brings 14 years of prior experience in the aerospace industry, with roles in offering management, product line management, operations, project management, and new product and technology development. She has 19 awarded patents and holds a doctorate degree in atomic physics.

Dr. Russell Stutz is currently the Director of Commercial Hardware Products, where he is responsible for the design and build of commercial quantum computers. He received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Kansas, taking a commission in the US Air Force through the ROTC program upon graduation. As an Air Force officer, he worked on laser research at the Air Force Research Lab, Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland AFB, NM. Dr. Stutz received his PhD from the University of Colorado-Boulder in atomic, molecular, and optical physics in 2010. Eric Cornell, his research advisor at CU, is a Nobel Laureate in Physics. After receiving his PhD, Dr. Stutz has worked in industrial research and development at AOSense, a small company in California developing quantum sensors, as well as Lockheed Martin in Colorado. He has been with Honeywell since 2016, and was one of the first employees at the Broomfield, CO site.