Prof. Ignacio Cirac is a Spanish theoretical physicist in the field of quantum information theory. With his collaborators, he introduced the first proposals of quantum computers, simulators, and repeaters with atoms, and developed a theory of tensor networks to describe quantum many-body systems. Ignacio Cirac graduated in Theoretical Physics at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) in 1988, and gained his PhD in 1991 at the same university. Between 1991 and 1996, he was Associate Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), and spent eighteen months at the University of Colorado (US) working with Peter Zoller. From 1996 until 2001 he was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). Since 2001 he is a member of the Max Planck Society and director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany). In 2002 he also became honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich. Prof. Cirac has won numerous awards, including the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society in 2018, the Bell Prize in Physics 2019 and the Micius Quantum Prize in 2019.
