Physics, Quantum Physics

IOP Joule Medal Winner Janssen Joins Royal Society Fellowship

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May 28, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Professor JT Janssen, Chief Scientist at NPL, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society following a career distinguished by advances in quantum electrical metrology, work for which he received the IOP James Joule Medal in 2017. His research focuses on the behavior of electrons in nanostructured devices, contributing to the development of a quantum standard for electrical current and expanding understanding of phenomena like the quantum Hall effect in graphene and the Josephson effect. Janssen also provides scientific leadership across a broad spectrum of disciplines, while serving as President of the Consultative Committee on Ionising Radiation and on the council of the UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council. “I am truly honoured to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society,” Janssen said, “and it is also a recognition of the exceptional metrology research NPL undertakes.”

This specialized field focuses on establishing a quantum standard for electrical current, demonstrating a commitment to fundamental accuracy in electrical measurement. Janssen’s responsibilities as Chief Scientist at NPL include leading scientific engagement with academic and governmental bodies, encompassing disciplines from chemistry to medical life sciences, and reflecting the breadth of his leadership.

The recognition afforded by these roles reflects a commitment to translating advanced physics into practical, standardized measurements and applications. These appointments, coupled with contributions to areas like graphene and the Josephson effect, highlight a career that integrates theoretical investigation with practical application and international scientific leadership, ultimately benefiting areas beyond the scope of initial research.

I am truly honoured to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. It is also a recognition of the exceptional metrology research NPL undertakes, and I would like to thank the many colleagues and collaborators I have had the pleasure of working with throughout my career.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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