Professor Ronald Hanson, QuTech’s Scientific Director, has been appointed as new member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In the Netherlands, membership of KNAW is a big accolade for an academic career. A total of 19 new members have been appointed.

Members of the KNAW are leading scientists from a wide variety of different disciplines. They are chosen based on nominations from colleagues, both in and out of the academy. Membership is for life. On Monday 16 September, the new academy members be installed.

Professor Ronald Hanson (1976) is working with a team of academic and industrial partners on a quantum internet that cannot be hacked or intercepted based on entangled quantum states that are spatially separate. This has been made possible thanks to two breakthroughs achieved by his own team. The first was to achieve quantum entanglement between electron spins that were more than a kilometre away from each other. The second involved controlling a local register of several qubits on a single chip. In his team, Hanson brings together quantum optics, nanotechnology, condensed matter physics and quantum computer science.

Read the Press Release by the KNAW (in Dutch) for more information.