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’.
Dr. Kostas Blekos is an Associate Research Scientist at CaSToRC within The Cyprus Institute and a core member of the QUEST team. He earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical & Computational Physics from the University of Patras. His research bridges applied and mathematical aspects of quantum computing—spanning quantum complexity theory, quantum information, and the design of hybrid quantum‑classical algorithms (notably the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm, QAOA)—alongside machine learning for physical‑science applications. He has led initiatives that include devising new quantum algorithms, advancing quantum control and noise-mitigation methods, and exploring quantum many-body dynamics on emerging quantum processors, logging hundreds of hours of experimental runs on quantum-processing units (QPUs). His broader interests encompass multi-scale computational modeling, from first-principles simulations to AI-driven analysis of complex physical systems.