Dr Pete Shadbolt is Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of PsiQuantum, a quantum computing company on a mission to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer and deploy it to tackle some of the greatest challenges we face — across climate tech, energy, pharma, defense, financial services and beyond.

PsiQuantum’s approach to building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer involves a photonics-based architecture that enables manufacturing in a conventional silicon chip foundry. After earning his PhD in experimental photonic quantum computing from the University of Bristol in 2014, Pete was a postdoc at Imperial College researching the theory of photonic QC. During his time at Bristol, he demonstrated the first-ever Variational Quantum Eigensolver and the first-ever public API to a quantum processor.

He has been awarded: the 2014 EPSRC “Rising Star” by the British Research Council; the EPSRC Recognizing Inspirational Scientists and Engineers Award; and the European Physics Society Thesis Prize.