Personal
- Born 19 January 1953 in Highland Park, Illinois, USA
- Married, two children, five grandchildren
Education
- Princeton University, A.B. in Physics, Summa Cum Laude, 1975
- Harvard University, Ph.D. in Physics, 1980
Employment
- Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, 1980–81
- Assistant Professor, Harvard University, 1981–82
- Associate Professor, Harvard University, 1982–83
- Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1983–90
- Professor of Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1990–
- Director, Institute for Quantum Information, 2000–2014
- John D. MacArthur Professor, 2002–2009
- Director, Center for the Physics of Information, 2003–2011
- Richard P. Feynman Professor, 2010–
- Director, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, 2014–
- Amazon Scholar, AWS Center for Quantum Computing, 2020–2026
- Senior Scientist, Oratomic, Inc., 2026-
Honors
- Highland Park High School Valedictorian, 1971
- Manfred Pyka Memorial Prize in Physics, Princeton University, 1972
- Kusaka Memorial Prize in Physics, Princeton University, 1974, 1975
- Albert G. Milbank Memorial Scholarship Prize, Princeton University, 1974
- George B. Wood Legacy Prize, Princeton University, 1974
- National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1975–78
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, 1982–86
- NSF Presidential Young Investigator, 1984–89
- Associated Students of Caltech Teaching Award, 1990–91, 2001–02
- Fellow, American Physical Society, 1991–
- IBM Faculty Partnership Award, 2000
- Andrejewski Lecturer, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2001
- Lorentz Chair, University of Leiden, 2002
- Rouse Ball Lecturer, University of Cambridge, 2005
- Biedenharn Lecturer, University of Texas at Austin, 2005
- Morris Loeb Lecturer, Harvard University, 2006
- H. L. Welsh Lecturer, University of Toronto, 2009
- Aisenstadt Chair, Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, U. Montreal, 2011
- Member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2014
- Roger Dashen Memorial Lecturer, UC San Diego, 2015
- Robert Resnick Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University, 2016
- Leigh Page Lecturer, Yale University, 2016
- Arnold Sommerfeld Lecturer, University of Munich, 2016
- Edythe and Irving Misel Family Lecturer, University of Minnesota, 2016
- Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer, American Mathematical Society, 2017
- Oppenheimer Lecturer, UC Berkeley, 2017
- Chester Peterson Jr. Lecturer, Kansas State University, 2017
- Frontiers of Physics Lecturer, University of Washington, 2017
- Van Winter Memorial Lecturer, University of Kentucky, 2018
- Bhaumik Lecturer, UCLA, 2018
- Bethe Lecturer, Cornell University, 2019
- Hearne Eminent Lecturer, Louisiana State University, 2019
- Bold Ideas in Physics Lecturer, Georgia Tech, 2019
- Distinguished Lecturer, Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology, 2019
- Dirac Lecturer, University of Cambridge, 2023
- Distinguished Quantum Seminar, Princeton University, 2023
- John Stewart Bell Prize, 2024
- Llewelyn G. Hoxton Lecturer, University of Virginia, 2024
- Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lecturer, Stanford University, 2024
- Wolfgang Pauli Lecturer, ETH Zurich, 2024
- Frontiers of Science Award, 2025 (shared with Hsin-Yuan Huang and Richard Kueng)
- Quantum World Congress Academic Pioneer in Quantum, 2025
- Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, 2025
Service and Outreach
- National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee
- Scientific Coordinator, Quantum Systems Accelerator
- Science and Technology Advisory Committee, Q-NEXT
- Advisory Board Chair, InQubator for Quantum Simulation of Quantum Systems
- Advisor, QIS program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- Scientific Advisory Board, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
- Scientific Advisory Board, Joint Quantum Institute
- Columnist, Quanta Magazine
- X @preskill, over 200,000 followers
Research Interests
- Quantum information, quantum matter, and quantum gravity
- Particle physics and cosmology