Isaac Chuang, PhD

Isaac Chuang is the Julius A. Stratton Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at MIT and Senior Associate Dean of Digital Learning—a pioneer in quantum computing and a driving force behind MIT’s online learning initiatives. He earned his bachelor’s degrees in physics and electrical engineering and his master’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT, then completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University as a Hertz Fellow. He subsequently served as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining IBM’s Almaden Research Center as a research staff member, where he performed the first experimental demonstrations of quantum computing using nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. His group demonstrated two-, three-, five-, and ultimately seven-qubit quantum computers, carrying out landmark demonstrations of Shor’s algorithm and Grover’s algorithm on physical quantum computers. He later joined the MIT faculty and has championed the development of MIT’s strategy for open online education. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.