Professor Paul G. Kwiat received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley (1993), where his dissertation was on nonclassical effects from spontaneous parametric downconversion. After two years as a Lise Meitner Fellow with the quantum optics group of Prof. Anton Zeilinger (at the Univ. of Innsbruck, Austria), he went to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as an Oppenheimer Fellow; in 1998 he became a technical staff member in the Neutron Science and Technology group of Physics Division. He has given invited talks at numerous national and international conferences and has authored more than 100 articles on various topics in quantum optics and quantum information, including several review articles. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society and an Expert Panel member for both the Quantum Computation and Quantum Cryptography Roadmaps.
In 1998, Professor Kwiat was awarded the LANL Fellows Prize for his work on optical studies of quantum information. He has done pioneering research on the phenomena of quantum interrogation, quantum erasure, and optical implementations of quantum information protocols. He is a primary inventor of the world's first two sources of polarization-entangled photons from down-conversion, which have been used for quantum cryptography, dense-coding, quantum teleportation, entanglement distillation, and most recently, optical quantum gates. In January 2001, he joined the Physics faculty as the second Bardeen Chair.
In 2018, Professor Kwiat was instrumental in the formation of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently serving as the center's inaugural Director. IQUIST seeks to accelerate quantum information science (QIS) research on the Urbana campus through collaborations across physics, electrical and computer engineering, computer science, math, and other engineering disciplines; and to build new educational programs to better equip a future QIS-smart workforce.