John Martinis — SPARQNOW

At-a-Glance

Shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for joint work on macroscopic quantum phenomena in superconductors.
Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2004.
Founded Qolab in 2022, a quantum computing company based on semiconductor chip manufacturing.
Led the Google Quantum AI Lab team that claimed the first evidence of quantum supremacy in 2019 with the Sycamore processor.
His doctoral research in 1985 on Josephson junctions became the basis for superconducting quantum computing.
Received a PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987.

Biography

John Matthew Martinis is an American physicist and Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Born in 1958, he earned his Bachelor of Science in physics in 1980 and a Doctor of Philosophy in physics in 1987 from the University of California, Berkeley. During his doctoral studies, advised by John Clarke and collaborating with Michel Devoret, he investigated the quantum behavior of a Josephson tunnel junction.