Speaker biographies:

Yanbei Chen received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 2003, was a Staff Scientist at the Albert-Einstein-Institute (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), Potsdam, Germany, from 2004-2007, and is currently Assistant Professor of Physics at Caltech.

Hideo Mabuchi received his A.B. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology; he is currently employed as a Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University.

Lorenza Viola received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Padua (Italy) in 1996, followed by postdoctoral appointments at MIT, 1997-2000, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a J.R. Oppenheimer Fellow, 2000-2004. She has been at Dartmouth since Summer 2004 as an Associate Professor of Physics. She is currently also chairing the APS Topical Group on Quantum Information.

Howard Wiseman is Director of the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at Griffith University. He has been working in quantum measurement and control since 1991, and has co-authored a book on this with Gerard Milburn (Cambridge, to be published). In his PhD he showed how quantum trajectory theory from quantum optics could be applied to the problem of quantum feedback. As a postdoc in Auckland he worked mainly on atom optics. Since 1996 he has held ARC research fellowships. The first, as a Postdoctoral Fellow was on adaptive measurements. The second, as a QEII Fellow, was on non-Markovian quantum trajectories, which includes “realistic” quantum trajectories for non-ideal measurement devices. The third, as a Federation Fellow, is in the fields of quantum information, measurement, and control. He has over 130 journal papers and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

Ian R. Petersen received a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering in 1984 from the University of Rochester. From 1983 to 1985 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University. In 1985 he joined the School of Electrical Engineering, University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy and he is currently a Scientia Professor. He currently holds an Australian Research Council Australian Federation Fellowship. He served as the Executive Director for Mathematics, Information and Communication for the Australian Research Council from 2002-2004. He was also Acting Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) for the University of New South Wales in 2004. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Systems and Control Letters and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. Currently he is an Editor for Automatica. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. His research interests are in robust control theory and its applications, robust filtering and state estimation, nonlinear control, optimal control, and quantum control.

Seth Merkel graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in '03 with a BS in physics and is currently working on a PhD in the Quantum Information Group at the University of New Mexico under the advisement of Prof. Ivan Deutsch.

Anne E. B. Nielsen is a PhD student at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Hendra Ishwara Nurdin is a Research Fellow in the Department of Engineering of the Australian National University, Canberra, working on feedback control of quantum systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia (1999), a master's degree in engineering mathematics from University of Twente, The Netherlands (2002), and a PhD degree in engineering and information science from the Australian National University (2007). His research interests are in the area of systems and control theory, including the special topic of control of classical and quantum dynamical stochastic systems.