Hlér Kristjánsson (Upcoming member)

Biography

I am an incoming Assistant Professor in Quantum Machine Learning (starting Jan 2025) at Université de Montréal/Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, working on quantum information, foundations, computation and machine learning. I grew up in Akureyri, Iceland, and later in Cambridge, UK. I completed my undergraduate and master's degree in Physics at Imperial College London, UK, in 2018 and did my masters' thesis at the University of Freiburg, Germany, on a one-year Erasmus exchange program, in the group of Prof Dr Andreas Buchleitner. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Oxford in 2022, under the supervision of Prof Giulio Chiribella and Prof Jonathan Barrett, with a few months as a visiting PhD student at the University of Hong Kong. In 2021, alongside my PhD, I worked as an independent research consultant in quantum communications for Ofcom, the UK Office for Communications. From 2022-23, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo, in the group of Prof Mio Murao, and from 2023-24 an independent postdoctoral research fellow in quantum foundations and quantum information at the Perimeter Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, ON.

In addition to science, I have also studied non-degree courses in violin performance as an Ash Music Scholar at the Royal College of Music, London, UK, in German at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, in French at Université de Montréal, and in Chinese language as a Huayu Scholar at the National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan. As a musician, I have co-composed and released an original album, and performed as a violinist at various venues. In my spare time, I like cooking and learning languages, as well as doing exercise and mindfulness meditation.