Raymond Laflamme
Scientific Director
Raymond Laflamme is the Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo and Ivey Foundation Fellow of CIAR's Quantum Information Processing Program. He was born in Quebec City and completed his undergraduate studies in Physics at Université Laval. He then moved to Cambridge, England, where did his Ph.D. in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) under the direction of Stephen Hawking. He and Don Page are responsible for having changed Hawking's mind on the reversal of the direction of time in a contracting Universe (see his book "A Brief History of Time"). After his Ph.D., Dr. Laflamme became a Killam post-doctoral fellow at UBC. He moved back to Cambridge in 1990 as a Research Fellow at Peterhouse. He eventually settled down for nine years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, arriving as a post-doctoral fellow. He became an Oppenheimer Fellow in 1994, then became Technical Staff in 1997. In 2001 he returned to Canada to join the newly founded Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the University of Waterloo. Soon after he and Michele Mosca founded the Institute for Quantum Computing. Dr Laflamme became the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information in 2002 and received la Medaille Grande Escolle de l’Association des Diplomes de l’Universite Laval in 2005.
Dr. Laflamme works on methods to control quantum devices, in particular the ones related to quantum error correction. He also has interests in the use of quantum computer to simulate quantum systems, experimental implementation of small quantum information processing devices and the investigation of optical systems including linear elements, single photons source and detectors for quantum information processing devices.