Royal Academy selects Barbara Terhal as a member

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has selected eighteen new members, four of whom are from TU Delft. One of them includes Barbara Terhal, a professor at the EEMCS Department and a staff member at QuTech since 2017. Terhal received her PhD degree Cum Laude from the University of Amsterdam in 1999 on ‘Quantum Algorithms and Quantum Entanglement’, making her the first person to get a PhD in quantum computing in the Netherlands.

Barbara Terhal (1969)
Professor of Quantum Computing, Delft University of Technology
Barbara Terhal is an authority on quantum information theory. In 1999 she was the first person in the Netherlands to get a PhD in quantum computing. In her dissertation, she introduced the concept of ‘entanglement witnesses’, which make it possible to differentiate between a state of quantum entanglement and a state of no entanglement. This concept now has widespread application in both theoretical and experimental research. Today, Terhal is an international expert on quantum error correction, a field of study crucial to building reliable quantum computers. Her search for quantum error correction has yielded many new insights along the way and led to a better understanding of what quantum computers can and cannot do.

The other three new TU Delft members are Ibo van de Poel, Jack Pronk and Frans van der Helm.

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