Raymond Laflamme is originally from Québec City, where he studied Physics as an undergraduate at the Université Laval. He completed his PhD on aspects of general relativity and quantum cosmology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) under the direction of Stephen Hawking. Laflamme and his colleague Don Page are responsible for having changed Hawking’s mind on the reversal of the direction of time in a contracting universe (see Hawking’s book, Brief History of Time).
From 1988-1992, Laflamme held a Killam post-doctoral fellowship at UBC, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge. From 1992-2001, Dr. Laflamme worked as a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his interests shifted from cosmology to quantum computing. Since the mid-1990’s, Laflamme has developed theoretical approaches to quantum error correction, and has given experimental demonstrations of these techniques. With colleagues, he has developed a blueprint for a quantum information processor using linear optics, and devised and implemented new methods to make quantum information robust against corruption in both cryptographic and computational settings.
In 2001, Laflamme returned to Canada as the founding Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) which he lead until 2017. He is an associate faculty of the Perimeter Institute For Theoretical Physics. Currently, Prof. Laflamme holds the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information, the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis “John von Neumann” Chair in Quantum Information and is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo.
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