Director

Masahiro Kitagawa
Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=ja&user=lWr4aWYAAAAJ

Masahiro Kitagawa is the Director and a specially-appointed Professor of the Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology, Osaka University. He received BEng in ’81, MEng in ’83 both in Electronics, and Ph.D. in Quantum Physics in ’94 from Osaka University. He was a research staff at NTT Basic Research Laboratories from ’83 to ’93 and found “Squeezed Spin States”, which was selected as Physical Review A 50th Anniversary Milestones in 2020.

He was a faculty member of Osaka University since ’93 and a Professor of Graduate School of Engineering since ’03 until he retired in ’24. He served as Project Leader of JST/CREST Projects; “Nuclear Spin Network Quantum Computers” (’99-05) (the 1st Quantum Computing Project in Japan), “Molecular Spin Quantum Computers” (’05-11), and “Hypersensitive MRI/NMR by means of Room Temperature Hyperpolarization and Quantum Coding” (’16-22).

He is a member of Physical Society of Japan and a life member of American Physical Society. His research interest includes quantum optics, quantum measurement and sensing, quantum computing, quantum information, and quantum biology.

Since 2020, he is the Project Leader of Quantum Software Research Hub (QSRH) which involves more than 30 industrial partners and 5 academic institutions and is a part of Quantum Innovation Hubs (QIH), the Program Director of the Moonshot Goal 6 “Realization of a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer that will revolutionize economy, industry, and security by 2050”, and, a member of Quantum Technology Innovation expert panel, Cabinet Office, Government of Japan.

He co-founded QunaSys Inc., a quantum computing software startup in 2018, and, QuEL Inc., quantum middleware and control electronics startup in 2021.