Photonic

Simmons earned a BA in Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Physics from the University of Waterloo and a PhD in Materials Science from Oxford (2011) as a Clarendon Scholar. She then conducted postdoctoral research at UNSW Sydney with Andrea Morello's group, contributing to the first demonstration of quantum logic between two electrons in silicon. She is an Associate Professor of Physics at Simon Fraser University, a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Silicon Quantum Technologies, and a CIFAR Fellow. She co-founded Photonic in 2016, and her group's work on T centres — silicon defects that couple spin qubits to telecom-wavelength photons — earned two Physics World Top Ten Breakthroughs.

Thewalt is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Simon Fraser University, where he co-leads the Silicon Quantum Technology Lab with Stephanie Simmons. His experimental research over decades has focused on optical spectroscopy of semiconductor impurities and spin dynamics in silicon, providing the foundational materials characterization work that identified T centres as viable silicon-photonic qubit candidates. He co-founded Photonic in 2016 to commercialize the silicon spin-photon interface technology developed jointly between his and Simmons's SFU research programs.