John M. Martinis

John M. Martinis (born 1958 in San Pedro, Los Angeles) is an American physicist and a leading experimentalist in superconducting quantum computing. He earned his BS in 1980 and PhD in 1987, both in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, completing his doctorate under John Clarke with a dissertation on macroscopic quantum tunneling in Josephson junctions; that 1985 work with Clarke, demonstrating quantized energy levels in a Josephson junction, became foundational to superconducting quantum computing. After a postdoctoral position at CEA Paris-Saclay and research on superconducting quantum interference devices at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara, faculty in 2004, holding the Susan and Bruce Worster Chair in Experimental Physics, where a device his group built was named Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year in 2010. Google hired him in 2014 to build its Quantum AI Lab, where in 2019 his team reported the first experimental evidence of quantum supremacy using the 53-qubit Sycamore processor; he resigned from Google in April 2020. He later worked with Silicon Quantum Computing in Australia, co-founded the quantum computing company Qolab in 2022 with Alan Ho, and shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in electric circuits.