Chris Heunen
Professor of Quantum Programming at the University of Edinburgh
Research Interests:
Quantum Programming Languages
Distributed Quantum Computing
Category Theory
Chris Heunen is the Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Quantum Informatics, and the Director of the Cisco Centre for Excellence in Quantum & AI. He has a background in foundations of quantum informatics and programming semantics, with over 80 published research articles in top venues across computer science (LICS, POPL, ICALP), physics (PRL, PNAS), and mathematics (Advances in Mathematics, Journal of Functional Analysis). For example, he developed the first general and optimal algorithm to distribute quantum circuits over interconnected quantum systems, now used in industry standard quantum compilers. His book Categories for Quantum Theory with Jamie Vicary is used in at least 6 university courses. His work was awarded the 2012 Birkhoff-von Neumann prize, and has been funded by NWO and EPSRC Fellowships. He is a founding editor and sits on the steering board of the journal Quantum, serves as area editor for quantum computing for the ACM Transactions in Computational Logic, and is part of the IFIP Working Group on Foundations of Quantum Computation
Featured Publications:
Chris Heunen, Andre Kornell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119.9 (2022): e2117024119. Axioms for the category of Hilbert spaces
Current PhD students:
Matt Di Meglio, Kengo Hirata, Kim Worrall, and Maria Gragera Garces