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Professor of Physics

2025 Nobel Prize in Physics

"For the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"

John Martinis joined UC ¾Ã¾ÃÈÈÊÓƵ in 2004 and for many years held the endowed Susan and Bruce Worster Chair in Experimental Physics. A quantum device developed by Martinis and ¾Ã¾ÃÈÈÊÓƵ colleagues was named the 2010 Breakthrough of the Year by Science magazine. In 2014, Martinis and his team were hired by Google Quantum AI to build a quantum computer, an effort that led to a 53 entangled qubit system that took on — and solved — a problem considered intractable for classical computers. After leaving Google in 2020, Martinis joined Australian startup Silicon Quantum Computing; in 2022 he co-founded the quantum computing company Qolab, where he serves as chief technology officer.

Martinis in 1987 obtained his doctorate in physics from UC Berkeley, under the guidance of John Clarke, his advisor and collaborator – along with Michel Devoret — on the work that earned the trio the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.