John Martinis attended University of California, Berkeley from 1976 to 1987. His PhD thesis was a pioneering demonstration of quantum-bit states in superconductors. After postdoctoral research at CEA in France, he joined NIST Boulder where he developed electron counting devices and invented x-ray microcalorimeters. In 2004 he moved to University of California, Santa Barbara where he continued work on quantum computation. In 2014 he was awarded the London Prize for low-temperature physics research. That year he also joined the Google quantum-AI team, and now heads a hardware effort to build a useful quantum computer.
