Quantum pioneer Professor Michael Biercuk has been named the Paul Shetler Disruptor of the Year at the InnovationAus 2024 Awards for Excellence for his work leading Q-CTRL, which is poised to transform countless industries with its quantum computing technology.
The InnovationAus 2024 Awards for Excellence were presented at a black-tie gala dinner at The Venue Alexandria in Sydney on Wednesday night.
The Paul Shetler Disruptor of the Year Award shines a spotlight on individuals who have made an enormous impact on the sectors in which they work.
It is named in honour of the former chief executive of the then-Digital Transformation Office, who was recruited from the United Kingdom to drive the development of Australian government digital services.
Mr Shetler made a tremendous and positive impact on the way that the federal government approached digital service delivery, and was a classic disruptor and critical thinker.
He died suddenly in early 2020 after suffering a heart attack.
The Paul Shelter Disruptor of the Year award was sponsored by SXSW Sydney. The award was presented on the night by SXSW Sydney head of conference programming Fenella Kernebone.
Professor Biercuk received the prestigious award for his work guiding Q-CTRL to among some of the top quantum companies in Australia and around the world, and pioneering the cutting-edge technology across a range of sectors.
He earned an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Harvard University, and then held a research fellowship in the Ion Storage Group at NIST and later served as a full-time technical consultant to DARPA.
He then moved to Australia and founded Q-CTRL in 2017, the first spin-off company from the University of Sydney’s Quantum Science Group.
Q-CTRL is a hardware and software company offering an infrastructure layer that can improve the performance of existing quantum platforms.
It is ready to transform industries ranging from finance and pharmaceuticals to logistics and defence through its focus on quantum sensing.
The company closed a $US72 million Series B venture capital round this year, the world’s largest ever for quantum software, and secured the first ever OEM software integration into a major cloud quantum computing platform.
Professor Biercuk is also the chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and a Professor of Quantum Physics and Quantum Technology at the University of Sydney.
He was the co-winner of the inaugural Australian Hero award at the InnovationAus 2021 Awards for Excellence, and won the 2015 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Outstanding Early Career Investigator.
The other finalists in the Paul Shetler Disruptor of the Year Award were OOXii Global founder and director Sarah Crowe, Cool Beans Underwear founder and CEO Saara Jamieson, and Peak Medical founder and CEO Hayley Saddington.
The InnovationAus 2024 Awards for Excellence are supported by the Australian Computer Society, Investment NSW, Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Technology Council of Australia, TechnologyOne, National Artificial Intelligence Centre, CSIRO’s ON Innovation Program, Reason Group, Q-CTRL, University of New South Wales, South by South-West Sydney and IP Australia.
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