Jeremy O'Brien
O'Brien is a physicist who held professorships in Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Bristol, where he founded and directed the Centre for Quantum Photonics, and later at Stanford. He demonstrated the first photonic two-qubit logic gate, invented integrated quantum photonics as a field, and co-invented the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) — work spanning 150 papers with over 40,000 citations (h-index 88). He co-founded PsiQuantum in 2016 to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer using silicon photonics manufactured in conventional semiconductor foundries, and transitioned from CEO to Executive Chairman in early 2026.