Nobel Laureate John Martinis to Deliver Quantum Computing Lecture at UWA

Insider Brief

• Nobel Laureate Professor John Martinis will deliver a free public lecture at the University of Western Australia (UWA) on the development of quantum computing and the experiments behind superconducting qubits.
• Martinis, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and Michel Devoret, will discuss his early research and experiments that advanced superconducting quantum computing.
• The November 10 lecture will cover how semiconductor manufacturing techniques and systems engineering could support the development of scalable quantum computers.

PRESS RELEASE — How quantum computing has evolved during the past 40 years from an intellectual curiosity to a potentially realisable technology will be the subject of a free public talk at The University of Western Australia next month by US Nobel Laureate Professor John Martinis.

Professor Martinis, from the University of California, was one of three scientists, including John Clarke and Michel Devoret to win the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit”.

He will describe his thesis work that led to the Nobel Prize, as well as several other important experiments that have advanced superconducting qubits, the basic unit of information in quantum computing.

In his talk Professor Martinis will show how adopting existing semiconductor technology to build much higher-quality qubits and employing system engineering approaches could pave the way to full-stack scalable technology.

Professor Martinis carried out pioneering experiments in superconducting qubits in the mid-1980s for his PhD thesis and has worked on a variety of low temperature device physics during his career, focusing on quantum computation since the late 1990s.

He was awarded the London Prize in low temperature physics in 2014 for his work in this field. From 2014 to 2020 he worked at Google to build a useful quantum computer, culminating in a quantum supremacy experiment in 2019.

He was awarded the John Stewart Bell prize in 2021. In 2023 he co-founded the startup Qolab to build a superconducting quantum computer.

The free public lecture will be held at UWA’s Octagon Theatre on Tuesday 10 November at 6.30pm. Tickets are free but you must register here to attend.

Professor Martinis is in Perth as part of the Forrest Research Foundation Distinguished Visiting Researcher program and also will present a plenary lecture at the 21st Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and Wisps, at UWA, which runs from November 8 to 13.