John Martinis

Dr. John M. Martinis is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and professor emeritus of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is internationally recognized for his foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum computing. In 2025, Dr. Martinis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics—shared with his collaborators John Clarke and Michel H. Devoret—for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantisation in superconducting circuits, a breakthrough that revealed quantum physics in action and helped pave the way for modern quantum technologies.

Dr. Martinis earned his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, where his doctoral research demonstrated that quantum effects could be observed in engineered macroscopic systems—work that became a bedrock for later advances in quantum information science. His early experiments with Josephson junctions provided crucial empirical evidence that quantum phenomena could be controlled beyond the subatomic scale, influencing everything from quantum computing to precision measurement.

In 2014, Dr. Martinis and his research team were recruited to lead the Google Quantum AI Lab, where they developed a 53‑qubit superconducting processor that demonstrated quantum supremacy—performing a computation infeasible for classical supercomputers at the time. After leaving Google in 2020, he continued advancing quantum hardware and co‑founded the quantum computing company Qolab, serving as its Chief Technology Officer.

Dr. Martinis’s work continues to shape the trajectory of quantum research worldwide, bridging fundamental physics and the emerging era of quantum technologies.