Jeremy O’Brien: The Quantum Revolution
GERALD WESTHEIMER LECTURE
Quantum computing is finally moving from a scientific curiosity to a technical reality, promising to solve previously unsolvable problems.
Professor Jeremy O’Brien is the CEO and co-founder of quantum company PsiQuantum. In the 2023 Gerald Westheimer Lecture, Jeremy shares PsiQuantum’s approach to scaling, and ultimately building a fault-tolerant million qubit system, making it an exciting prospect for investors and industry.
In an interview with ABC’s Tegan Taylor, Jeremy also shares his insights on becoming one of the world’s best funded quantum startups, how he keeps his focus on the long game, and lessons learnt in building his company from the ground up.
Jeremy O'Brien
CEO, PsiQuantumJeremy O'Brien is co-founder and CEO of PsiQuantum, a quantum computing company on a mission to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer and deploy it to tackle some of the greatest challenges we face — across climate, healthcare, life sciences, energy and beyond. Professor O’Brien has dedicated 25 years to this mission, having identified quantum computing as the most profoundly world-changing technology, due to its potential to unlock solutions to otherwise impossible problems.
PsiQuantum is building a utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer with a silicon photonics-based architecture that enables manufacturing in a conventional silicon chip foundry. Photonic qubits have significant advantages at the scale required to deliver a fault-tolerant quantum computer and PsiQuantum partnered with semiconductor company GlobalFoundries to achieve this objective. With core quantum components already in volume production, this is an unprecedented economic signal of maturity for a technology that is often viewed as being at the early research phase.
Prior to founding PsiQuantum, Professor O’Brien was Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at Stanford and Bristol Universities, and Director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales, holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Emerging Technologies, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.