John Preskill
Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics
California Institute of Technology

Caltech 305-16
Pasadena, CA 91125
email: preskill@caltech.edu



Personal

Born 19 January 1953 in Highland Park, Illinois, USA
Married, Two Children

 

Education

Princeton University, A.B. in Physics, Summa Cum Laude, 1975
Harvard University, Ph.D. in Physics, 1980

 

Employment

Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, 1980-81
Assistant Professor, Harvard University, 1981-82
Associate Professor, Harvard University, 1982-83
Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1983-90
Professor of Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1990-
Director, Institute for Quantum Information, 2000-2014
John D. MacArthur Professor, 2002-2009

Director, Center for the Physics of Information, 2003-2011

Richard P. Feynman Professor, 2010-

Director, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, 2014-
Amazon Scholar, AWS Center for Quantum Computing, 2020-

 

Honors

Highland Park High School Valedictorian, 1971

Manfred Pyka Memorial Prize in Physics, Princeton University, 1972

Kusaka Memorial Prize in Physics, Princeton University, 1974, 1975

Albert G. Milbank Memorial Scholarship Prize, Princeton University, 1974
George B. Wood Legacy Prize, Princeton University, 1974
National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1975-78
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, 1982-86
NSF Presidential Young Investigator, 1984-89
Associated Students of Caltech Teaching Award, 1990-91, 2001-02
Fellow, American Physical Society, 1991-
IBM Faculty Partnership Award, 2000
Andrejewski Lecturer, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2001
Lorentz Chair, University of Leiden, 2002

Rouse Ball Lecturer, University of Cambridge, 2005
Biedenharn Lecturer, University of Texas at Austin, 2005
Morris Loeb Lecturer, Harvard University, 2006

H. L. Welsh Lecturer, University of Toronto, 2009
Aisenstadt Chair, Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, U. Montreal, 2011

Member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2014

Roger Dashen Memorial Lecturer, UC San Diego, 2015

Robert Resnick Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University, 2016

Leigh Page Lecturer, Yale University, 2016

Arnold Sommerfeld Lecturer, University of Munich, 2016

Edythe and Irving Misel Family Lecturer, University of Minnesota, 2016

Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer, American Mathematical Society, 2017

Oppenheimer Lecturer, UC Berkeley, 2017
Chester Peterson Jr. Lecturer, Kansas State University, 2017
Frontiers of Physics Lecturer, University of Washington, 2017
Van Winter Memorial Lecturer, University of Kentucky, 2018
Bhaumik Lecturer, UCLA, 2018
Bethe Lecturer, Cornell University, 2019

Hearne Eminent Lecturer, Louisiana State University, 2019

Bold Ideas in Physics Lecturer, Georgia Tech, 2019
Distinguished Lecturer, Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology, 2019
Dirac Lecturer, University of Cambridge, 2023
Distinguished Quantum Seminar, Princeton University, 2023
John Stewart Bell Prize, 2024
Llewelyn G. Hoxton Lecturer, University of Virginia, 2024
Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lecturer, Stanford University, 2024
Wolfgang Pauli Lecturer, ETH Zurich, 2024


 

Service and Outreach

National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee
Scientific Coordinator, Quantum Systems Accelerator

Science and Technology Advisory Committee, Q-NEXT
Advisory Board Chair, InQubator for Quantum Simulation of Quantum Systems

Advisor, QIS program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
Scientific Advisory Board, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
Scientific Advisory Board, Joint Quantum Institute
Columnist, Quanta Magazine
X @preskill, over 140,000 followers

 

Research Interests

Quantum information, quantum matter, and quantum gravity

Particle physics and cosmology