Research Title: Topological Phases and Topological Quantum Computation
Institute: From UC Berkeley to NUI Maynooth

Dr. Jiri Vala was born in Brno, Czech Republic. He studied physical chemistry at the Masaryk University in Brno and at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovak Republic.

His Ph.D. research was focused on control of atomic and molecular quantum systems with Prof. Ronnie Kosloff at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. In 2001, he became a postdoctoral fellow of Prof. Birgitta Whaley at the University of California at Berkeley developing physical and conceptual models for quantum computation and quantum information technologies. Dr. Vala has published more than twenty scientific papers and has given a number of invited and contributed talks and seminars in the U.S.A., Europe, Israel and Japan. He has held visiting positions at M.S.R.I. in Berkeley, Harvard University, and C.N.R.S. in France and his research has attracted interest in the private U.S. technology sector. Other professional activities include organization and subsequent supervision of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Seminar series for several years and regular referee contributions to scientific journals such as Physical Review Letters.

Dr. Vala will continue his research at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth where his work will focus on topological quantum computation. This exciting field offers intrinsic physical protection of quantum information against detrimental errors and thus enables naturally fault-tolerant quantum computation.