On September 5, Jon Yard joined the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization as an Associate Professor.
Jon completed his Ph.D. in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University in 2005. He then held postdoctoral fellowships at McGill, Caltech, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Microsoft Research. At Los Alamos, he held the position of Richard R. Feynman Postdoctoral Fellow from 2009 to 2012.
Jon's research interests are in quantum computing, quantum information theory, non-commutative number theory, and complexity theory. He is well known for his proof with Graeme Smith that quantum capacity does not completely characterize the utility of a channel for transmitting quantum information. He has published papers on topological quantum computation, quantum gate compilation, and condensed matter physics.
Jon is affiliated with Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.