Wolfgang Lechner studied physics at the University of Vienna, where he received his PhD in the field of theoretical physics in 2009. After a PostDoc at the University of Amsterdam, he moved to Innsbruck in 2012 where he worked in the group of Prof. Peter Zoller at the IQOQI of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck. In 2016, he became an assistant professor at the University of Innsbruck. With his habilitation at the University of Innsbruck in 2019, he became a tenured professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Prof. Lechner develops novel methods for quantum simulation and quantum computing and is best known for the invention of the LHZ (Lechner-Hauke-Zoller) quantum computing architecture.
He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Loschmidt Prize (2011), Wallnöfer Prize (2015), Thirring Prize (2017), START Prize (2017), the Houska Prize (2019) and the Research Faculty Award by Google (2020). The spin-out ParityQC recently received the Phönix Award and was named one of the most promising spin-offs by Nature. Wolfgang Lechner was among the 32 inventors who are building a better future as named by the magazine Wired. Prof. Lechner has published more than 50 papers, is frequently an invited speaker at international conferences and has filed 8 patents in the field of quantum computing.
