Professor Michelle Simmons

Scientia Professor of Physics, University of New South Wales; Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow; NSW Scientist of the Year, CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science

Keynote:

The exponential increase in computing through a quantum leap – what will this mean to you and your organisation? (9.30am – 11am , Tuesday November 8th)

Exponential Conversation:

Energising our Intellectual Capacity…connecting the dots between research and industry (8.45am – 10.30am, Wednesday November 9th)

Plus participation in Gala Dinner Disruptive Debate and HOT SPOT program

Professor Simmons is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow & Director of the highly successful Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology. She has pioneered unique technologies internationally to build electronic devices in silicon at the atomic scale, including the world’s smallest transistor, the narrowest conducting wires and the first transistor where a single atom controls its operation. This work opens up the prospect of developing a silicon-based quantum computer: a powerful new form of computing with the potential to transform information processing.

Professor Simmons is one of a handful of researchers in Australia to have twice received a Federation Fellowship and now a Laureate Fellowship, the Australian Research Council’s most prestigious award of this kind. She has won both the Pawsey Medal (2006) and Lyle Medal (2015) from the Australian Academy of Science for outstanding research in physics and was, upon her appointment, one of the youngest fellows of this Academy.

She was named Scientist of the Year by the New South Wales Government in 2012, and in 2014 became one of only a few Australians inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has recently become Editor-in-Chief of Nature Quantum Information and in 2015 was awarded the CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science.