Patrick Hayden

School of Computer Science

McGill University

Patrick Hayden holds the Canada Research Chair in the Physics of Information at McGill University. He is an enormously prolific and powerful problem solver with a unifying vision for his research program.  His research focuses on finding efficient methods for performing the communication tasks that will be required for large-scale quantum information processing.  This includes the development of methods for reliably sending quantum states through ‘noisy’ media and for protecting quantum information from unauthorized manipulation.  He has also applied these techniques to the question of information loss from black holes. He is widely published in the top physics and information theory journals and is a frequent invited speaker at prestigious international conferences. He serves as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, as well as having served on the program committees of many excellent conferences.  So far in his career, he has refereed over 300 journal and conference papers.  Dr. Hayden is an enthusiastic supervisor of students, with a large cohort of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, as well as being an inspiring mentor to many undergraduate students. He was instrumental in organizing a summer school on quantum information science that brought over 80 young graduate students from around the world to Montréal, giving them the opportunity to learn new skills not available to them in their home countries.  Dr. Hayden has won many honours.  He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, the winner of a Sherman Fairchild Prize Fellowship at Caltech, and a Rhodes Scholar.  More recently, he has been awarded a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.