John Preskill Wins Major Quantum Pioneer Award from QWC

John Preskill from the California Institute of Technology has been honoured with the Quantum World Congress Academic Pioneer in Quantum Award for 2025, recognising his pioneering work on fault‑tolerant quantum computing protocols that enable reliable operation of noisy quantum devices. Since joining Caltech in 1983, Preskill has led research into quantum error correction, establishing benchmarks that guide the transition from noisy intermediate‑scale quantum machines to fault‑tolerant systems. His scholarship, which underpins the field’s roadmap, has attracted a generation of young scientists who now occupy leadership roles across universities, laboratories and industry worldwide.

Preskill earned a BA from Princeton and a PhD from Harvard before joining Caltech’s faculty in 1983. His early work spanned high‑energy physics, particle theory and cosmology; since the mid‑1990s he has concentrated on quantum computing and quantum information. He pioneered fault‑tolerant protocols and quantum error‑correction, establishing it as a viable path to fault‑tolerant machines and popularising benchmarks and terminology that guide the transition from noisy devices to fully reliable systems.

In his acceptance speech, Preskill, who also holds the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair and directs the Institute for Quantum Science and Matter (IQIM) at Caltech, expressed pride in the community he has helped build, thanked young scientists, highlighted Caltech’s quantum training that has produced leaders worldwide, and linked this diaspora to the interdisciplinary culture essential for the maturation of quantum technology.

The award coincided with the International Year of Quantum, celebrating the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics. Preskill reflected on the century‑long journey of learning about electrons, photons, atoms and molecules, and framed the current era as the nascent second quantum revolution, noting two fundamental questions: how to scale up to machines capable of solving hard problems and what applications will emerge once such machines exist. He suggested that the next decade will bring markedly clearer insights.

QWC serves as a global forum to accelerate the quantum field, debating and disseminating advances such as Preskill’s fault‑tolerant mechanisms that enable processors to function reliably in the presence of noise, and his guidance in weaving these strategies into viable architectures at IQIM.

At its core, the challenge addressed by fault-tolerant quantum computing lies in the fragility of quantum states themselves. Unlike classical bits, which maintain a definite value (0 or 1), qubits are highly susceptible to decoherence—loss of quantum information due to uncontrolled interactions with their environment. These interactions manifest as noise, causing the quantum computations to drift unpredictably, an issue that limits current systems to the realm of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices.

Preskill’s work emphasizes the move toward encoding logical qubits, which are abstract representations of information stored redundantly across multiple physical qubits. This technique, integral to codes like the Surface Code, allows the system to detect and correct local errors—such as single-qubit bit-flips or phase-flips—without disturbing the encoded quantum information itself. This capability fundamentally moves computation beyond simple error mitigation toward active error correction.

However, realizing true fault tolerance necessitates massive increases in hardware overhead. Encoding just one reliable logical qubit often requires hundreds, or even thousands, of physical qubits, alongside complex ancillary circuits devoted solely to syndrome measurement. This architectural requirement of scaling up physical resources to support the required logical fidelity represents one of the most formidable engineering and material science challenges facing the field today.

Furthermore, the successful implementation of these advanced protocols demands not just qubits, but also highly coherent control mechanisms. These mechanisms must precisely mediate entangling gates—such as controlled-NOT gates—across large arrays of qubits with unprecedented fidelity and speed. The integration of control electronics and cryogenics near the quantum processor remains a critical bottleneck in transitioning theory into scalable, operating machinery.