Irfan Siddiqi

Siddiqi was one of the five faculty recipients of the "2016 Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award", which is the University of California, Berkeley's most prestigious honor for teaching. In 2021, Siddiqi was awarded the Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science "for fundamental advances in superconducting parametric amplifiers, including the development of the Josephson traveling wave parametric amplifier, and for their application to quantum measurement and control."

Irfan Siddiqi is an American physicist and currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He currently is the director of the Quantum Nanoelectronics Laboratory at UC Berkeley and the Advanced Quantum Testbed at LBNL. Siddiqi is known for groundbreaking contributions to the fields of superconducting quantum circuits, including dispersive single-shot readout of superconducting quantum bits, quantum feedback, observation of single quantum trajectories, and near-quantum limited microwave frequency amplification. In addition to other honors, for his pioneering work in superconducting devices, he was awarded with the American Physical Society George E. Valley, Jr. Prize in 2006, "for the development of the Josephson bifurcation amplifier for ultra-sensitive measurements at the quantum limit." Siddiqi is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016.

Siddiqi was born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and is a direct descendant of the well-known leader of the Khilafat Movement, Muslim activist, journalist and poet, Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar (Urdu: مَولانا مُحمّد علی جَوہر) Siddiqi moved to New York City at an early age. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, Bronx, NY, where he developed a strong interest in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His aptitude in physics and mathematics led him to the Columbia University Science Honors Program. He went on to Harvard University to complete his undergraduate education, earning an A.B. with distinguished honors (cum laude) in Chemistry and Physics in 1997. Inspired by superconductivity and superconducting digital circuits during a summer internship at HYPRES, Inc., he enrolled at Yale University for his doctoral studies. His graduate work focused mainly on aluminum hot-electron bolometers for microwave astronomy. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 2002, he remained as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale to research high frequency measurement techniques for superconducting qubits. His post-doctoral work resulted in the development of the Josephson Bifurcation Amplifier, which makes use of the non-dissipative, non-linear nature of the Josephson junction to realize high gain and minimal back action measurements of quantum systems. He joined the University of California, Berkeley as a faculty member in the summer of 2005, and is currently a full professor in the Physics Department. In 2015, his laboratory was awarded the UC Berkeley Award for Excellence in Laboratory Safety, awarded by the Berkeley Office of Environment, Health and Safety.