Ignacio Ciriac 

Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics

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J. Ignacio Cirac is a Spanish physicist, director of Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany. He is an expert in quantum computing and communication. With his collaborators, he introduced the first theoretical proposals of quantum computing, simulation, and communication repeaters, and developed a theory of tensor networks to solve problems quantum physics. He studied theoretical physics and gained his PhD at the University Complutense of Madrid in 1991. After a postdoc at JILA (Boulder, US) and becoming Associate Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) in 1996. Since 2001 he is director of the Theory Division at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching (Germany) and Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. He is also the speaker of the International Max-Planck Research School on Quantum Science and Technology, co-speaker of the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology, and coordinates the consortium on theoretical quantum computing in the Munich Quantum Valley. For his work he has been awarded several prizes, among them the Prince of Asturias, the BBVA frontiers of knowledge, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Wolf Prize, and the Max-Planck Medal. He is a member of the Spanish, Leopoldina (German), National (American), and Bavarian Academies of Sciences, and holds nine honorary doctor degrees. He was member of the board of Telefonica S.A. between 2016 and 2023.

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