Prof. Karl Jansen is the QUEST ERA Chair holder. He has vast experience in Quantum technologies and he is the head of the Center for Quantum Technologies and Applications (CQTA) and a member of the NIC research group ‘Elementary Particle Physics’ located at DESY Zeuthen. His received his PhD in 1988 in Theoretical Particle Physics at Technical University of Aachen, Germany with title “Investigation of the upper bound for the Higgs boson mass n the lattice”.
During his academic career Dr. Jansen received several prestige fellowships; the Fellowship of the German National Scholarship Foundation (1978 – 1985), the Heisenberg Fellowship of the German Research Association (1995) and a CERN Fellowship as Scientific Associate (1996). He received several awards as a recognition of the high-quality of his research; the 2011 Ken Wilson Lattice Award, the Experienced Researcher award from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation 2012/2013 and the NIC award for excellence project computing gµ − 2. In 2000 he was appointed Leader of Research Group Particle Physics at the John von Neumann-Institute of Computing. He has been journal editor in Computational Science and Discovery and journal referee in a number of high-impact journals including Phys. Rev. Lett., Phys. Lett. B, Nucl. Phys. B., Phys. Rev. D, EPL, JHEP, CPC and Quantum. Dr. Jansen has more than 500 publications and more than 20 PhD students graduated under his supervision.
Prof. Constantia Alexandrou is the QUEST Principal Investigator (PI). She received a BA degree in Physics from the University of Oxford in 1980 and a PhD in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA in 1985. She held research positions at the Paul Scherer Institute, Switzerland and at Erlangen University, Germany. Prof. Alexandrou is Professor at the Physics Department of the University of Cyprus, where she leads the Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) Computational Lab. She is coordinator of several research programs, has numerous scientific publications and invited talks at international meetings and has organized several workshops in Cyprus and abroad. She is the representative of Cyprus at IUPAP and PRACE. For The Cyprus Institute, she served as Vice-Chair of the Interim Governing Board (IGB) and as Chair of the IGB of the Computational-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC). In July 2010, the Board of the Institute bestowed Alexandrou with the title of ‘Institute Professor’.
Assist. Prof. Marios Christodoulou is the QUEST Team Leader (TL). He received his PhD in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics from the University of Marseille in 2017 and was previously leading a research group at the internationally renowned Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Vienna. IQOQI Vienna is known for many other highly impactful contributions to the foundations of modern quantum computing theory and applications and is at the forefront of research in photonic quantum computing as well as related quantum sensing theory and technologies. During his previous position, he initiated a consortium project on “The Quantum Information Structure of Spacetime (QISS)” for which he had received 6.2 million from the John Templeton Foundation.