Reunion Keynote Lecture

Saturday, October 3, 2015 2:30 pm - 2:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Embrace the Quantum Revolution, Reunion 2015 Keynote Lecture by Raymond Laflamme, IQC Executive Director 

Join Raymond Laflamme, Executive Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), for a discussion on Canada’s next great technological revolution – the quantum revolution. Dr. Laflamme will share how researchers at the University of Waterloo are harnessing the power of the quantum world and creating technologies that utilize nature’s most precise laws. Learn how IQC research is already disrupting classical technology and the transformational effects these quantum technologies will have on society.

headshot of raymond laflamme
About Raymond Laflamme:

Raymond Laflamme was born in Quebec City and did his undergraduate studies in Physics at Universite Laval. He then moved to Cambridge, England, where he survived Part III of Mathematical Tripos before earning his PhD in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) under the direction of Stephen Hawking. Laflamme and Don Page are responsible for having changed Hawking's mind on the direction of time in a contracting Universe (as described in Hawking’s best-seller "A Brief History of Time"). After his PhD, Laflamme became a Killam post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, where he met his future wife Janice Gregson. He moved back to Cambridge in 1990 as a Research Fellow at Peterhouse. He finally settled down for nine years at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He arrived as a postdoctoral fellow, then became an Oppenheimer Fellow in 1994, just after the birth of his son Patrick. His daughter Jocelyne was born in 1995. In 2001 he joined the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics as a founding member. He has founded the Institute for Quantum Computing with Michele Mosca and has been its Executive Director since 2002.

The institute has grown to more than 150 researchers as of 2012. Laflamme holds a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Quantum Information, he directs the Quantum Information program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is a respected pioneer and leader in quantum information processing that earned him a Fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of Canada. In 2011 he founded Universal Quantum Devices, a startup commercializing spinoffs of quantum information research, with colleagues Thomas Jennewein and Steve MacDonald.