Prof Francesco Petruccione; Director, National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences
Professor Francesco Petruccione holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Freiburg i. Br. (Germany). He was a South African Research Chair in Qunatum Information Processinga and Communication at UKZN and became Professor of Quantum Computing in the School of Data Science and Computational Thinking of Stellebosch University in 2022. Prof Petruccione is the the Director of the National Insitute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS) and co-leads the Africa Europe Cluster of Research Excellence in Addressing Global and African Challenges through Methods from Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Theoretical and Computational Thinking (CoRE-AI). he is an elected member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa and a Fellow of various esteemed institutions including the Royal Society of South Africa, the African Academy of Sciences, and UKZN.
Prof. Petruccione’s scholarly contributions are profound, with over 250 papers in peer- reviewed scientific journals. Among his publications, the monograph “The Theory of Open Quantum Systems” stands out, garnering more than 10,000 citations and seeing translations in Russian.
Moreover, his collaborative work with Maria Schuld titled “Supervised Learning with Quantum Computers” (2018) has been translated into Japanese, with its second edition, “Machine Learning with Quantum Computers”, released in 2021.He serves on the Editorial Board of several scientific journals including “Open Systems and Information Dynamics”, “Scientific Reports”, and “Quantum Machine Intelligence”.