Winfried Hensinger

Director at Sussex Centre For Quantum Technologies

Speaker

Professor Winfried Hensinger heads the Sussex Ion Quantum Technology Group and he is the director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies. He is a co-founder of Universal Quantum, a full stack quantum computing company, where he serves as Chief Scientist and Chairman. Winfried Hensinger obtained his undergraduate degree at the Ruprechts-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany and then moved to the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia to complete a Master’s degree. Subsequently he obtained his PhD at the University of Queensland under guidance of Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, Norman Heckenberg and Gerard Milburn in the field of experimental nonlinear quantum dynamics with ultracold atoms. During his PhD candidature he spent an extended period at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, USA in the group of Nobel laureate William Phillips where he demonstrated dynamical tunnelling in a sodium Bose-Einstein condensate. After completing his PhD he spent three years as a FOCUS Research Fellow in the group of Chris Monroe at the University of Michigan developing ways to scale ion trap quantum information processing. In 2005, he moved to the University of Sussex, where he is now Professor of Quantum Technologies. Hensinger’s group works on constructing a trapped-ion quantum computer demonstrator device, a quantum simulation engine as well as portable quantum sensors in collaboration with a number of academic and industrial partners. The short film 'The Frontier of Computing' (linked) provides a popular science introduction about his research. Devoting much of his life to utilizing the strange nature of physics to solve the world’s problems, this short documentary follows him on his current venture to create a large-scale quantum computer.