John Watrous (computer scientist)
John Harrison Watrous is the Technical Director of IBM Quantum Education at IBM and was a professor of computer science at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, a member of the Institute for Quantum Computing, an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.[1][2] He was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary from 2002 to 2006 where he held a Canada Research Chair in quantum computing.He is well known for his work on quantum interactive proofs, and the quantum analogue of the celebrated result IP = PSPACE: QIP = PSPACE.[12] With Scott Aaronson, he showed that certain forms of time travel can make quantum and classical computation equivalent: together, the authors showed that quantum effects do not offer advantages for computation if computers can send information to the past through a type of closed timelike curve proposed by the physicist David Deutsch.[13] He obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the supervision of Eric Bach.