Martin Plenio
- Professor
- Institute of Theoretical Physics and Center for Quantum BioSciences, Ulm University
Martin B. Plenio pursued his passion for physics, earning his degree in 1992 and completing his PhD in 1994 at the Georg-August Universität Göttingen in Germany. Following this, from 1995 to 1997, he held a Feodor Lynen Fellowship under the sponsorship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, working in the research group led by Prof. Sir Peter Knight FRS at Imperial College.
In 1998 he began to establish his fully independent research career when he became faculty member of the Physics Department of Imperial College London. Over the years he rose to Full Professor in 2003 and later, in 2005, taking on the additional role of Programme Director at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2005. In 2009 he established the UK’s first Doctoral Training Center on Quantum Science and Technology at Imperial College.
Martin Plenio has made remarkable contributions to the fields of entanglement theory, metrology and sensing, and quantum technologies, focusing on atoms, ions, photons, and color centers in diamond. His research also contributed fundamental insights into the exploration of quantum effects in biology. His scholarly output comprises over
400 papers, with more than 60,000 citations on Google Scholar and an H-Index of 113. He is recognized as a highly cited researcher.
Throughout his career, Martin has garnered numerous accolades and honors. Some of his notable awards include the Maxwell Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics (2004), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2006), the prestigious Clifford Paterson Lecture from the Royal Society of London, and an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship
(2008). Additionally, he was honored with the Max-Born Medal by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society (2012) and secured successive ERC Synergy grants in 2012 and 2019.
Martin Plenio’s impact extends beyond academia. He is the founder and Director of the Center for Quantum BioSciences, for which he has successfully attracted €27 million in funding for a cutting-edge research facility. Moreover, he has played a pivotal role as the co-founder of two high-technology startups: NVision Imaging Technologies, focussed on quantum enhanced medical imaging, today boasting a workforce of over 60 employees, and QCDesign, developing scalable fault tolerant quantum computing architectures, which now employs 10 individuals.
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