Daniel Lidar

He was a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, a 2007 Fellow of the American Physical Society, a 2012 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and 2015 Fellow of the IEEE. He is listed as one of the top 20 authors of the decade 2000–2009 in Quantum Computing by Thomson Reuters' Sciencewatch. In 2009 he was elected an Outstanding Referee of the American Physical Society. His early career awards include a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Young Explorer Award given by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research for the top 20 researchers in Canada under age 40, and the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Chemistry awarded by the Ontario Council of Graduate Studies.

In 1997–2000, he was a postdoc at UC Berkeley, having been awarded Rothschild Foundation and Fulbright Program fellowships (the latter of which he declined); in 2000–2005, he was an assistant professor and then later an associate professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, with cross-appointments in Physics and Mathematics. He moved to the University of Southern California in 2005, where he is a Professor of Electrical Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics.

He is a class of 1986 graduate of the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West. He obtained his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1997 under Robert Benny Gerber and Ofer Biham, with a thesis entitled Structural Characterization of Disordered Systems.