Speakers

Dr Chris Ballance is the President of Quantum Computing at IonQ and co-founder of Oxford Ionics, an IonQ company. With over a decade of experience at the forefront of the quantum computing industry, Chris has set multiple world records in quantum computing performance including highest performance quantum logic gates, longest qubit memory coherence time, and the fastest and highest performance quantum network. Since founding Oxford Ionics in 2019, Chris has scaled the company to over 100 employees across the globe, raised over £30m in funding, and oversaw the $1.075B acquisition of Oxford Ionics by IonQ. Under his leadership, the company has secured the current world records in three metrics of quantum computing performance: single-gate, two-qubit gate, and SPAM fidelity. At IonQ, Chris manages a team of over 500+ in the Compute organisation, focused on accelerating the path to fault tolerant quantum computing. Chris holds a PhD in trapped-ion quantum computing from the University of Oxford, where he is also a Future Leaders Fellow.