Prof. dr. Lieven Vandersypen

Lieven Vandersypen studied Mechanical Engineering at the KU Leuven and received a MSc and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He carried out most of his PhD research at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. During these years, his scientific interests and fascination evolved from mechatronics to micro-electromechanical systems to quantum mechanics and quantum information.

As a PhD student, Lieven used the spins of atomic nuclei in a molecule as quantum bits and implemented various quantum algorithms for the first time. Most famously, he demonstrated Shor’s quantum algorithm for finding the prime factors of the number fifteen (15=3×5).