Barbara Terhal is a Professor at the EEMCS Department at Delft University of Technology and a staff member at QuTech since 2017. She has a long-standing interest and track-record in quantum error correction and fault tolerance. She views a scalable implementation of quantum error correction as one of the great challenges in physics today. The fact that this challenge can be viewed both as a question of ‘mere engineering’ as well as a question about the fundamental viability of macroscopic quantum information, is precisely what makes it fascinating, and thus its resolution ground-breaking.

Barbara received her PhD degree cum laude from the University of Amsterdam in 1999 on “Quantum Algorithms and Quantum Entanglement”, making her the first person to get a PhD in quantum computing in the Netherlands. After her PhD thesis, she was a postdoc at IBM Research at Yorktown Heights, NY and at Caltech, before returning to IBM as research staff member in 2001. 

In 2010, she left IBM to become professor in theoretical physics at RWTH Aachen University, supplemented by a position at FZ Juelich from 2015 until 2022. She has been a fellow of the American Physical Society since 2007, and a distinguished visiting research chair at Perimeter Institute since 2014.