The Quantum World Congress (QWC) announced on September 18 that it was giving John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, its Academic Pioneer in Quantum Award for 2025.
Preskill earned a BA from Princeton and a PhD from Harvard in physics, and joined the Caltech faculty in 1983. He started his career as a theoretical high energy physicist, working on ideas spanning particle physics to cosmology. Since the mid-1990s, Preskill has focused his work on quantum computing and quantum information, particularly on fault-tolerant protocols that can make quantum computers reliable and secure in spite of the noise generated by such systems.
“John’s work gave quantum computing its roadmap,” said George Thomas, president and CEO of Connected DMV, the nonprofit that created and operates QWC, in a press release. “He translated daunting physics into frameworks that engineers can build on and students can learn from—and, in doing so, he helped an entire community move faster together.”
Preskill’s work in quantum error correction is described as crucial by the QWC: “Preskill’s scholarship helped establish quantum error correction as a path to scalable quantum computing; he also popularized field-defining benchmarks and terms … that frame how researchers chart progress from noisy devices to fault-tolerant systems.”
In his acceptance speech, Preskill, who is also the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair, and Director of the Institute for Quantum Science and Matter (IQIM), funded by the National Science Foundation at Caltech, says that he is “most proud of the quantum community we’ve built at Caltech and the many dozens of young people who imbibed the interdisciplinary spirit of Caltech and then moved forward to become leaders in quantum science at universities, labs, and companies all over the world.”
Preskill notes that he is especially thrilled to receive the Quantum Leadership Award during this, the International Year of Quantum. “The 100th anniversary of the discovery of quantum mechanics is a cause for celebration, because that theory provides our deepest and most accurate description of how the universe works. … What we have learned about electrons, photons, atoms, and molecules in the past century has already transformed our lives in many ways, but what lies ahead, as we learn to build and precisely control more and more complex quantum systems, will be even more astonishing.”
“These are still the early days in a nascent second quantum revolution [in which quantum principles are directly harnessed for technological purposes],” Preskill reflects. “In quantum computing, we face two fundamental questions: How can we scale up to quantum machines that can solve very hard computational problems? And once we do so, what will be the most important applications for science and for industry? … We won’t find the answers all at once … but 10 years from now we’ll have much better answers than we have today.”
Looking backward at progress so far in quantum computing and forward toward its promising future, Preskill remarks, “Let’s not forget how we got to this point. It was by allowing some of the world’s most brilliant people to follow their curiosity and dream about what the future could bring. To fulfill the potential of quantum technology, we need that spirit of bold adventure now more than ever before.”
The QWC was created in 2022 to provide a global forum “where researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, investors, academics, government officials, and students convene to advance the quantum field,” according to Thomas.