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Professor Brian DeMarco has advanced the frontier of using light, atoms and molecules for quantum science and technology for over 30 years. For his graduate work, DeMarco and his PhD advisor Deborah Jin created the first Fermi gas of atoms. As a postdoc working with Nobel laureate David Wineland, DeMarco made key contributions creating a scalable platform for trapped atomic ion quantum computing. At Illinois, DeMarco’s research group has pioneered quantum matter science, including the first demonstrations of Anderson localization in three dimensions, localization of strongly correlated particles, quenches across quantum phase transitions, and many-body localization. His research group is now tackling the challenge of realizing distributed quantum computing architectures. Professor DeMarco is the Director of the $25M NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks, and he is the Director of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST), which supports the $150M+ portfolio of quantum science and engineering research at Illinois.
Professor DeMarco has also provided key national leadership, including serving as the Chair of the NASA Fundamental Physical Sciences Standing Review Board. In that capacity, he led a team to develop a decadal plan for quantum space science—an achievement recognized by the NASA Group Achievement Award. DeMarco has a keen interest in the intersection of science, policy and national security. He serves on the chairline of the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs, and is one of 200 experts in science, math, technology, and medicine charged by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as a member of its Intelligence Science and Technology Experts Group.

Professor Virginia (Gina) Lorenz joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015, where her research group performs experiments in quantum optics and atomic, molecular and optical physics. Lorenz's research group currently focuses on a variety of areas in quantum optics: quantum networks, quantum memories, photonic quantum sources, quantum sensing. On November 4, 2023, in collaboration with other research teams and university and community partners, Lorenz launched the first publicly accessible quantum network. Her group investigates new sources of entangled photon pairs for use in quantum protocols. They are also developing a quantum memory capable of storing and retrieving THz bandwidth quantum states. Finally, her group studies quantum information theory to better understand and predict the limitations of sensing techniques in a wide range of applications.
She received her B.A. in physics magna cum laude and mathematics in 2001 and completed her Ph.D. in physics in 2007 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. From 2007-2009 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the University of Oxford, where she worked on implementations of quantum memories in atomic and solid-state systems. From 2009-2014, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware.