About

This journey started in 2004, when I began working professionally on quantum applications. The question then was: What was the simplest quantum system we could build that would still perform an interesting computation?

That is still the question I think about. When I started, the field was often framed as classical computing on one side of a sharp line and quantum computing on the other. I wondered what mathematical structure changed between the two.

I left in 2007 and went to Oxford, where I turned to the mathematics underneath the problem and wrote a thesis on it. Then I worked in Europe.

The question I kept coming back to is how computational structure arises at the boundary between quantum and classical systems. It is what I dreamed about understanding as an undergraduate.

For most of the last twenty years, this was a theoretical question about the physical limits nature places on our ability to compute. There was no hardware against which to test it. That has changed: my research now runs on real machines, so the answers can be checked.

ÉTS brought me to Montréal in October 2024. Québec has the ecosystem expertise and world-class quantum hardware needed to help lead quantum computing.

The question I arrived with is the one I started with in 2004. Nobody has answered it yet. What Minimal Structure Enables Quantum Computation?

To learn more about it, read the Terra Incognita page.