With 41.95% of the votes, Ilyas Khan, CEO of the UK startup Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC), has won the title of the “Quantum Personality of the Year 2020“.
As a visionary, Ilyas founded CQC in 2014, when the word ‘quantum’ was anything but trendy.
CQC has recently announced a strategic partnership with Roche for using its quantum programming tools in new drug discovery. The company is also highly involved in Quantum Natural Language Programming (NLP).
Additionally CQC raised the largest amount of capital of any Quantum software company in 2020.
Prior to CQC, Ilyas has been Chairman and Trustee of The Stephen Hawking Foundation and a “Leader in Residence” at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School.
He has a long-standing interest in the foundations of mathematics and category theory. He is a Life Member of the American Mathematical Society.
You can read his interview there.
As a reminder, the other nominees were:
- Paulina Mazurek (BEIT), Poland
- Itamar Sivan (Quantum Machines), Israël
- Daniel Twitchen (E6 – Element Six), United Kingdom
- John Levy (Seeqc), USA