University of Bristol
Sima Bahrani
Sima Bahrani is a researcher in quantum communication with over a decade of experience in the design, performance analysis, and optimisation of quantum networks. Her research spans quantum cryptography, entanglement-based networks, the coexistence of quantum and classical communication infrastructures, and distributed quantum computing. She focuses on developing scalable quantum network architectures for a wide range of quantum technologies.
Alexander Clark
Alex Clark is Director of the Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (QET Labs) and Associate Professor in Quantum Technologies in the School of Physics at the University of Bristol. He has worked on photonic quantum technology for 20 years, developing novel integrated photon sources, frequency converters, multiplexing systems, and quantum memories. He has applied quantum photonic technologies to many application areas including quantum computing, communication, sensing and imaging.
Siddarth Joshi
Siddarth Koduru Joshi’s research interests include entanglement sources, quantum networks and satellite QKD. He has pioneered multiplexed many-user quantum entanglement networks and worked on their applications beyond just QKD protocols, e.g. through anonymity, digital signatures, and authentication transfer. Siddarth has built the DV source for the SPOQC low-earth-orbit demonstrator, corresponding receivers for the Hub Optical Ground Station and the ground station for OS2-VOLT.
Dimitra Simeonidou
Dimitra Simeonidou has worked on the development of network technologies for the future Internet for the last 30 years. She has developed new ideas for high-performance networks, wireless-optical convergence, role and application of quantum security and computing in next-generation telecom networks including 6G.
Rui Wang
Rui Wang is an Early Career Researcher. He has worked on the development of photonics networking technologies for over a decade and specifically on quantum networking. Rui has developed new ideas for dynamic quantum networking utilising AI, and optical switch design for co-existence of quantum and classical networks. He has established large-scale quantum networks in Bristol including dynamic prepare-and-measure QKD networks and entanglement-based quantum networks.
University of Cambridge
Mete Atatüre
Mete Atatüre is a leader in diamond Quantum Technologies with 15 years of experience on the development of functioning quantum devices. Mete is one of the world leaders in diamond-based quantum spin photon devices and has pioneered research in group 4 spin systems.
Qixiang Cheng
Qixiang Cheng is an expert in photonic integrated circuits, especially in optical switching. He has led the development of novel photonic circuit designs for a range of applications, including Si-SiN multi-layered photonic switch circuit, multi-dimensional photonic switch fabric, photonic iterative processor, novel photonic computing structure for ML training, ultra-fine resolution spectrometer devices, and 3D nano-printed photonic structures. He also contributed to the development of new integration schemes, such as Si-SiN, InP-Si, and InP-SiN, via novel multi-segmented vertical couplers, and conducting pioneering research demonstrations on these platforms.
Dorian Gangloff
Dorian Gangloff’s work on two solid-state platforms – quantum dots and diamond colour centres – has been groundbreaking, with field-opening results in spin-photon quantum technologies and fundamental many-body quantum optics. Dorian has also contributed to major advances in optical control techniques for defects in diamond, in particular demonstrating the spin and optical coherence of the tin-vacancy centre and leading the development of the all-optical coherent control of this qubit.
Richard Penty
Richard Penty has extensive experience of researching quantum communications networks, photonic integrated circuits and optical data communications, including through his work on the National Dark Fibre Facility which hosts the UK Quantum Network.
Adrian Wonfor
Adrian Wonfor works primarily in the fields of discrete variable, continuous variable and entanglement-based QKD, with particular focus on the co-existence of quantum with high-data-rate classical communications. His research interests also include novel quantum communication protocols and their translation from lab demonstrations to real world network deployment.
University of Edinburgh
Myrto Arapinis
Myrto Arapinis is an expert in classical and quantum provable security with a particular focus on formal models, verification, protocol design, and the problem of secure composition. She has contributed to the field of security verification by exploring formal and foundational aspects as well as analysing widely deployed real-world electronic systems.
Mina Doosti
Mina Doosti is an Early Career Researcher. She is an expert in the field of quantum information, quantum cryptography and quantum communication. Alongside Myrto Arapinis and Elham Kashefi, Mina has co-founded the field of quantum hardware security. Her research in this field investigates new solutions for the challenges and pain points of secure quantum computing architectures and quantum communication using quantum hardware security, as well as finding new applications for quantum communication infrastructures. Her research also covers the intersection between the fields of quantum cryptography and quantum learning theory, leading to new quantum machine learning and learning-based techniques for quantum cryptanalysis.
Elham Kashefi
Elham Kashefi co-founded the field of quantum cloud computing and verification of quantum computing and has pioneered transdisciplinary research on the structure, behaviour, and interactions of quantum technology, from formal and foundational aspects all the way to actual industrial use-case delivery. She is the Chief Scientist of the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) and leads the Quantum Software Lab at Edinburgh.
University of Glasgow
Ross Millar
Ross Millar has worked on a range of Si photonics-based technologies. He has developed strain engineering techniques to investigate band-structure engineering of Ge and GeSn light emitters; demonstrated record low losses in Ge-on-Si waveguides for low-cost optical sensing, which has healthcare, pollution monitoring and defence based applications; and proposed device architectures for Ge-on-Si single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) that led to >100 X improvement in performance compared to the prior state-of-the-art. Ross is currently working on the design and fabrication of Ge-on-Si waveguide coupled single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs).
Douglas Paul
Douglas Paul is a world-leading expert on producing high efficiency Ge-on-Si single photon avalanche diode (SPADs) detectors. He sits on numerous government science expert committees and is the Principal Investigator for the UK Hub for Quantum Enabled Position, Navigation and Timing.
Heriot-Watt University
Erika Andersson
Erika Andersson evidences a breadth of expertise as manifested by her work on a wide range of different topics in quantum technology: high-dimensional quantum entanglement, quantum walks, the simulation of Floquet dynamics using photonic lattices, general properties of quantum master equations for open quantum systems, quantum measurements, and quantum digital signatures and quantum cryptography beyond quantum key distribution. She frequently collaborates with experimentalists and focuses especially on protocols and ideas that are experimentally feasible and relevant for actual practical applications.
Christiaan Bekker
Christiaan Bekker is an Early Career Researcher. He has developed a novel methodology for the scalable fabrication of microlenses to extract light more efficiently from solid-state defect qubits in silicon carbide, leading to a patent application. This can be harnessed to create arrays of high-fidelity qubits acting as quantum memories, integrated on a single silicon carbide chip.
Cristian Bonato
Cristian Bonato has an established track-record in different aspects of quantum communication and quantum spintronics, ranging from the first experimental demonstration of single photon exchange between a satellite and an optical ground station to the development of high-throughput cavity-enhanced single photon sources, the implementation of feedback control protocols, the demonstration of novel spin centres in SiC towards quantum repeaters, and their integration in opto-electronic structures.
Gerald Buller
Gerald Buller is the Director of the Integrated Quantum Networks Hub and was Principal Investigator of the EPSRC-funded Quantum Communications Hub. He held an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship in Quantum Technology (2015-2020) and is currently a Professor of Physics at Heriot-Watt University. He has worked in single-photon physics and its applications since 1990, and is a long-standing expert in quantum communications.
Ross Donaldson
Ross Donaldson works on applying new and novel photonic technologies to satellite QKD, including; application of SPAD array technology for combined detection, time-bin protocol implementation and multimode receivers, multicore fibre beaconing, and photonic lanterns.
Alessandro Fedrizzi
Alessandro Fedrizzi is a Professor of Physics at Heriot-Watt University with a twenty-year track record in experimental quantum technology research. His expertise lies in the engineering of quantum light sources for applications in quantum communication, computing and metrology. Alessandro’s current research focuses on quantum networking with multi-photon states and long-distance QKD over fibre and satellite links. He was a scientific lead on entanglement networking in the UK’s phase-2 Quantum Communications Hub.
Brian Gerardot
Brian Gerardot’s overall research motive is to design, fabricate, and optically probe novel quantum materials and devices in order to tune and (coherently) control quantum states in new ways. He has a diverse background with expertise in nanofabrication, optical spectroscopy, condensed-matter physics, and quantum optics. Brian’s work is at the forefront of international efforts to realize indistinguishable single photons and entangled photons from epitaxially grown quantum dots, positioning them as the best sources of quantum light for exploitation in future quantum communication networks.
Mehul Malik
Mehul Malik is recognised globally as a leading expert on high-dimensional quantum states of light and their applications in enhancing quantum technologies for communication and imaging. His body of work spans the generation, manipulation, transport, and measurement of photonic quantum states and has been recognised by an RSE Early Career Medal and an IOP Quantum Technology award.
Margherita Mazzera
Margherita Mazzera’s activity in IQN focuses on the development of broadband quantum memories for telecom photons with rare earth ion doped crystals, with potential for integration and multiplexing. Previous contributions in the area of photonic quantum memories include: a novel pioneering waveguide platform for highly multiplexed (100+ spectro-temporal modes) storage of telecom-heralded single photons; the storage of light-matter entanglement in a fully fibre-integrated system; the first quantum state transfer between quantum nodes of different nature; the first implementation of a full quantum storage protocol with real quantum states of light; and the first source of entangled photon pairs with controllable delay in rare earth ion doped crystals.
Xin Yi
Xin Yi is an Assistant Professor and EPSRC Quantum Technology Career Development Fellow (2023-2027) at Heriot-Watt University with >10 years of research experience in semiconductor-based avalanche photodiode detectors. His research focuses on cutting-edge quantum detectors, especially the development of single-photon avalanche diode detectors for operation in the short-wave infrared region (1400 – 3000 nm), a core subcomponent for emerging quantum technologies, including secure communications, quantum imaging, and other advanced photonics applications.
Kings College London
Roger Colbeck
Roger Colbeck is Professor of Quantum Information Theory at King's College London. He is a pioneer of device-independent (DI) quantum randomness expansion and has developed useful tools and relations between entropy measures that are useful for analysis of quantum random number generators and QKD. He was part of a team that demonstrated DI randomness expansion for the first time. He has developed new protocols for enhanced randomness rates and formed tight bounds on the relationship between the nonlocality of a system and the amount of DI randomness that can be derived.
National Physical Laboratory (NPL)
Christopher Chunnilall
Christopher Chunnilall is a Principal Scientist at the National Physical Laboratory, working on metrology for quantum photonic technologies. This involves developing SI-traceable measurement capability for the test and evaluation of single-photon emitters, detectors, and technologies based on these such as QKD and QRNGs, and establishing the NPL quantum networks testbed. Christopher contributes to the development of industry standards for quantum photonic technologies, through participation in relevant BSI, CEN/CENELEC, ETSI, and IEC and ISO committees.
University of Oxford
David Lucas
David Lucas is an expert in ion trap quantum networking and communication. His contributions include leading contributions to experimental quantum computing including qubit operations with world-leading fidelity; development of a quantum network with world-leading speed/fidelity performance; first achievement of device-independent QKD; first demonstrations of entangled atomic clocks and verifiable blind quantum computing.
Patrick Salter
Patrick Salter is internationally renowned for the development of adaptive optics technology in short pulse laser manufacturing. He co-invented the technique of laser writing of colour centre defects for quantum technology, while also developing new methodologies for manufacturing diamond detectors for high energy radiation.
Jason Smith
Jason Smith is the Professor of Photonic Materials and Devices in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford and leads the Photonic Nanomaterials Group (PNG). His research focuses on the science and application of optical systems at nanometer and micrometer length scales, seeking to develop new devices and instruments for future technologies, including optical devices for quantum communications and computing.
Sarah Thomas
Sarah Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering. Her research focuses on quantum memories in atomic ensembles – developing high bandwidth, telecom-compatible devices for synchronisation in quantum networks. She also works on interfacing quantum dot based single-photon sources with quantum memories.
Ian Walmsley
Ian Walmsley FRS’s research has focused on the quantum control of light and matter on ultrashort timescales. He has invented new techniques for characterization of quantum and classical light fields, enabling pioneering demonstrations of macroscopic quantum systems and their application in photonic quantum information technologies. Among his achievements are new discoveries in controlling photonic interference, leading to the first experimental demonstration of Boson Sampling – an important protocol for demonstrating quantum advantage in a computational task. Further, he has pioneered the development of broad-band, ultra-low-noise photonic memories based on warm atomic gases, with applications in protocols for entanglement distribution over quantum networks.
Queens University Belfast
Ayesha Khalid
Ayesha Khalid is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Secure information Technologies at Queen’s University Belfast, where she leads research on post quantum cryptography. She is a DAAD scholarship awardee for her doctoral studies at RWTH Aachen, Germany. She was a Co-investigator in the UK Quantum Communications Hub, Innovate UK AQuASeC project led by Toshiba Europe Limited and the Rolls Royce funded project SEQURED. Her research focuses on physically secure, efficient and highspeed accelerators for cryptography. She is a senior member of IEEE, member of IACR, and member of the IEEE Technical Committee on VLSI Systems and Applications (VSA).
Máire O'Neill
Máire O’Neill has made many pioneering research contributions in hardware security and applied cryptography, and in particular post-quantum cryptography (PQC). She is Director of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), which in 2015 was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its work in protecting online activity of billions of internet users around the world.
Ciara Rafferty
Ciara Rafferty is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Secure information Technologies at Queen’s University Belfast, where she leads research into advanced cryptography and data security. She was a lead researcher in the UK Quantum Communications Hub and a Co-investigator on the Innovate UK AQuASeC project led by Toshiba Europe Limited and the Rolls Royce funded project SEQURED. She is a senior member of IEEE and an EPSRC SPRITE+ Expert Fellow.
RAL Space
Andy Vick
Andy Vick is the Head of the Disruptive Space Technology Centre (DSTC) in RAL Space, whose aim is to accelerate the application of new, innovative technologies and techniques in the space domain. Under his leadership, the DSTC collaborates with original inventors and end users to develop disruptive technologies that benefit UK strategic aims, particularly those of the UKRI science councils. Within the DSTC, he is responsible for the teams, facilities and funding required to support a wide range of such projects, including software analysis systems, optical and photonic sub-systems, scientific instruments, space qualification methodologies, advanced processor hardware, and new detector technologies.
University of Sheffield
Alistair Brash
Alistair Brash is an EPSRC Quantum Technologies Research Fellow. He works on ultrafast semiconductor quantum optics, developing new experimental techniques in ultrafast coherent spectroscopy and optimised photon sources for optical quantum technologies.
Mark Fox
Mark Fox has been working on solid-state quantum emitters for over two decades with a special focus on the use of the Purcell effect to enhance the emission rate from semiconductor quantum dots embedded within photonic structures. In more recent years, he has focused on developing quantum-dot sources in photonic crystal cavities.
Jon Heffernan
Jon Heffernan is an experienced scientific leader with a track record of over 30 years in semiconductor materials, epitaxy and device innovation in both academic and corporate research environments. Since 2013, he has been the Director of the EPSRC National Epitaxy Facility. In 2025 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Pieter Kok
Pieter Kok works on entangled network generation and large baseline quantum enhanced telescopes. He has designed a deterministic entanglement protocol for spectrally distinct qubits such as quantum dots and applied it to entangled network generation and quantum error correction protocols. Pieter has also designed new protocols for quantum-enhanced telescopes that work with current technologies, as part of his broader research programme of quantum enhanced sensing and metrology protocols.
Maurice Skolnick
Maurice Skolnick FRS has an extensive track record on experimental quantum optics based on semiconductor quantum dots. He established the first such research programme in the UK more than 25 years ago and has continued to play a major role in maintaining an international profile within the UK’s semiconductor community through a number of large-scale research collaborations. Maurice was a founder of the single photon source spinout company AegiQ.
Luke Wilson
Luke Wilson has more than 25 years' experience in semiconductor quantum photonics and device physics, most recently in establishing the first electrical control of quantum dot emitters in the telecoms C-band, as well as non-linear quantum optics and control of collective coherence phenomena in scalable quantum dot nanophotonic systems.
University of Southampton
Patrick Ledingham
Patrick Ledingham has over a decade of contributions to the field of quantum light-matter interactions, with experience spanning multiple material systems. For quantum memories, this includes rare-earth-ion-doped solids, defects in diamond, and alkali vapours; for quantum light sources this includes nonlinear crystals and semiconductor quantum dots. Patrick has contributed to the development of six well-recognised memory protocols, with first-time demonstrations for three of these. He has advanced the field with the development of noise-supressing and novel filtering techniques, noise-free approaches and noisy quantum memory operations characterisation.
University of Strathclyde
Daniel Oi
Daniel Oi’s research focus is on theory, simulation and modelling of satellite quantum communications. He has made extensive contributions in new concepts in the characterisation of quantum coherence for quantum channels; quantum system characterisation; quantum computing and distributed scalable fault-tolerant architectures; and the use of nanosats/CubeSats for space quantum technology development. Daniel has led the development of the Satellite Quantum Modelling and Analysis (SatQuMA) open-source software suite for satellite QKD.
University of Warwick
Gavin Morley
Gavin Morley’s research interests lie in the development of novel quantum technologies with NV centres in diamond.
University of York
Rupesh Kumar
Rupesh Kumar’s expertise is in experimental quantum communications, with a particular focus on continuous-variable (CV) QKD. He has developed CV-QKD systems for optical fibre networks and free-space, including the payload and receiver for the SPOQC satellite QKD In-Orbit-Demonstrator. His work at York also includes R&D in optical ground stations and CV entanglement for communication and sensing applications.
Marco Lucamarini
Marco Lucamarini conceived Twin-Field (TF) Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), the only effective repeater to date capable of surpassing the repeaterless secret key capacity. He contributed to the first experimental demonstrations of TF-QKD, developing techniques to stabilise optical phase over long fibre links. Beyond TF-QKD, Marco played a key role in deploying the first UK Quantum Network, advancing implementations of the BB84 protocol, introducing novel quantum signature schemes, efficient realisations of Measurement-Device-Independent (MDI) QKD, and methods to mitigate QKD system vulnerabilities. He also uncovered new connections between entanglement distribution and QKD protocols and contributed to standards for quantum communications.
Stefano Pirandola
Stefano Pirandola is a Professor of Quantum Computing at the University of York and a leading expert in quantum information science. He has pioneered foundational work in quantum communications and networks, establishing the ultimate theoretical limits for tasks such as quantum key distribution, entanglement distribution, and quantum teleportation. His research spans quantum cryptography, continuous-variable (Gaussian) quantum information, quantum optics, bosonic channels, and quantum internet architectures — with implications for quantum metrology, computing, and secure quantum networks. In recognition of his groundbreaking contributions, he was awarded the IET Achievement Medal in Quantum Technology in 2025 for “establishing the ultimate communication rates for quantum key distribution, quantum teleportation, and entanglement distribution”.