John Preskill joins Amazon to advance Quantum Computing

John Preskill, one of the leading pioneers in Quantum Information Science, announced on Twitter that he will be working one day per week at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena. He will continue as a full time professor at Caltech.

I have news. Starting now I will be an Amazon Scholar, working one day per week at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena. We have an outstanding team, and I’m very excited to join. I will also continue as a full-time professor @Caltech and Director of @IQIM_Caltech. /1

— John Preskill (@preskill) June 27, 2020

This has been a quarter of interesting moves with John Martinis departing Google last month and points to increasing cross-pollination between business and academia.

John Preskill is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he is also the Director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. He is well known for coining the term “Quantum Supremacy”

Amazon, the Seattle e-commerce giant, has three quantum computing initiatives that is announced at its AWS re:Invent event in December 2019.

Preskill is joining the AWS Center for Quantum Computing which will bring together quantum computing experts from Amazon, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and other top academic research institutions to collaborate on the research and development of new quantum computing technologies.

The Company also offers Amazon Braket, a fully managed AWS service that enables scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from quantum hardware providers (including D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti) in a single place

Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab is a program that connects customers with quantum computing experts from Amazon and its technology and consulting partners to develop internal expertise aimed at identifying practical uses of quantum computing, and accelerating the development of quantum applications with meaningful impact.

Watch this space for new big announcements from the pioneers in the field.