John Martinis: Engineering the Quantum Future - A Donald Kerst Lecture Series

The WUD Distinguished Lecture Series and College of Letters and Science are excited to welcome John Martinis. “John Martinis: Engineering the Quantum Future” is a Donald Kerst Lecture Series and will feature a 60-minute lecture followed by a 30-minute audience Q&A. This is a free event taking place in Memorial Union’s Shannon Hall at 7:00 pm on March 23rd. John Martinis is a distinguished physicist and 2025 Nobel Laureate in Physics, renowned for his pioneering contributions to superconducting quantum computing. His research has been central to developing high-fidelity qubits and engineering the architectures needed for scalable quantum processors. He previously led Google’s quantum hardware team, where his group achieved the landmark 2019 quantum supremacy experiment — the first demonstration of a quantum computer outperforming the world’s most powerful classical supercomputer on a computational task. In 2022, he co-founded Qolab, where he now serves as CTO and continues to advance next-generation superconducting qubit technology and quantum system design.   Tickets are free but required. They will be available on March 16th at 2:00 pm.    CART captioning is provided with ASL interpretation upon request.