Lieven Vandersypen is the Director Research on the Board of Directors of QuTech, Delft University of Technology. He leads a group that focuses on single-spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots, for applications in quantum computing and quantum simulation.

He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2001, carrying out most of the research at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. As a PhD student, he used the spins of atomic nuclei in a molecule as quantum bits and implemented various quantum algorithms for the first time, demonstrating, most famously, Shor’s quantum algorithm.

He then moved to TU Delft, the Netherlands, first as a postdoc and since 2006 as Antoni van Leeuwenhoek professor. He leads a group that pioneered quantum computing based on electron spins in semiconductor quantum dots, often dubbed “artificial molecules”. Breakthrough results were the ability to trap, initialize, manipulate and read out the spin of single and coupled electrons. He furthermore worked for ten years on a diverse set of experiments using graphene, a layer of graphite just one atom thick. His current interests are to devise and demonstrate novel building blocks of a large-scale quantum dot spin qubit processor and to study many-body physics problems using quantum dot arrays.