In coordination with last year’s major Quantum 2022 event, IOP Publishing announced two international awards on 14 April as part of activities to mark World Quantum Day. Judged by an international panel of experts, both awards recognize and support scientific excellence and development of researchers in quantum science and technology at the early stages of their career. The two individual winners are:

International Quantum Technology Early Career Scientist Award
Feihu Xu, University of Science and Technology China, China, for his seminal contributions to quantum communication and quantum network, including the security of practical quantum cryptography, large-scale quantum network and high-speed quantum communication.

International Quantum Technology Emerging Researcher Award
Annabelle Bohrdt, University of Regensburg, Germany, for her developing novel approaches to analyse strongly-correlated quantum matter using snapshots of quantum states.

To celebrate the achievements and contributions of the two winners, IOP Publishing will be hosting a special awards webinar to be held at 1–2.30 p.m. BST on 25 May 2023. The webinar will be chaired by Prof. Chaoyang Lu of the University of Science and Technology China (USTC) in his role as chair of the awards committee. The two prize-winning talks will be:

• Secure quantum communication in a large scale – Feihu Xu
• A brief tour through the Fermi-Hubbard phase diagram via snapshots – Annabelle Bohrdt

We welcome the quantum science and technology community to register and attend the live ceremony.

Chao-Yang Lu (chair) is a professor of physics at the University of Science and Technology of China. His research interest includes quantum foundations, quantum computation, and quantum optics.

Feihu Xu has been a tenured professor of physics at USTC since 2021. Before joining USTC in 2017, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT, 2015–2017. He received a PhD from the University of Toronto in 2015. He works mainly on quantum communication and single-photon imaging, and has co-authored more than 100 journal papers including RMP, Nature, and Nature Photonics. He is the recipient of Optica Fellow in 2022, Changjiang Scholar in 2021, Xplorer Prize in 2021, Early Career Award (by IOP–NJP) in 2020, and the Outstanding Dissertation Award (by OCPA) in 2015. He serves as the steering committee of QCrypt and an associate editor of npj Quantum Information.

Annabelle Bohrdt is a theoretical physicist aiming for a microscopic understanding of strongly correlated quantum systems by developing new analysis tools. In her research, she combines numerical methods, intuitive physical pictures, close collaboration with quantum simulation experiments, and machine learning techniques. She obtained her doctoral degree from Technical University Munich (Germany). During her PhD, Annabelle spent two years as an exchange student in the group of Eugene Demler at Harvard. From 2021 to 2023, she was an independent ITAMP postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Since 2023, she is a professor for theoretical physics at the University of Regensburg, Germany.