QED-C executive director Celia Merzbacher and Martinis discuss innovation and the road to scalable quantum systems.
In this PARC Forum, 2025 Nobel laureate John M. Martinis joined QED-C executive director Celia Merzbacher to talk about the evolution of quantum, the state of today’s quantum ecosystem, and emerging real-world use-cases.
Martinis has been at the forefront of developing high-fidelity qubits essential for scalable quantum processors. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2025 for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit and now serves as the co-founder and CTO of Qolab, a quantum startup taking the next leap: industrial-grade superconducting QPUs built for useful computation. Martinis was a key figure behind Google’s quantum supremacy experiment and continues to mentor next-generation quantum scientists who are advancing the practical implementation of quantum.
“When I heard about this in grad school, I thought this was the most fascinating experiment. I thought it would be beautiful and new. To me, it was the most fascinating thing.” — John M. Martinis
Reflecting on the early PhD work that ultimately earned him the Nobel Prize, Martinis commented: “When I heard about this in grad school, I thought this was the most fascinating experiment. I thought it would be beautiful and new. To me, it was the most fascinating thing.”
Celia Merzbacher is the executive director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C®), the world’s premier association of pioneers in the quantum technology marketplace.
This timely conversation touches on the issues at the heart quantum innovation: public-private partnerships, evolving approaches to qubits, supply chain maturity, the cybersecurity implications of quantum, the commercial state of play, and much more.
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