Harry Buhrman is chief scientist quantum algorithms & innovation at Quantinuum. He is also professor of algorithms, complexity theory, and quantum computing at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and founding director of QuSoft, a research center for quantum software, which he co-founded in 2015. In 2020 he was elected as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In the late 90’s he built the first quantum computing group in the Netherlands, which was one of the first groups worldwide working on quantum information processing. Buhrman’s research focuses on quantum computing, algorithms, and complexity theory. He co-developed the area of quantum communication complexity (distributed computing), and demonstrated for the first time that certain communication tasks can be solved (exponentially) more efficient with quantum resources. This showed that quantum computers can not only speed up computations, but also communication – which opened up a whole new application area of quantum information processing. Buhrman co-developed a general method to establish the limitations of quantum computers, and a framework for the study of quantum query algorithms, which is now textbook material.
He obtained a prestigious Vici-award and has coordinated several national and international quantum computing projects. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for quantum optics, WACQT (Sweden), and IQC (Canadian). He started and chaired the first steering committee for QIP, the main international conference on quantum information processing. Current research interests are: Quantum Computing, Quantum Information Theory, Quantum Cryptography, Computational Complexity Theory, Kolmogorov complexity, Distributed Computing, Computational Learning Theory, and Computational Biology.