Dr. Joseph Salfi is an Investigator at Blusson QMI and an Assistant Professor at UBC’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with expertise in experimental quantum physics and electrical engineering.

Joe’s research is of significance to the quantum computing industry as he experimentally investigates prototypes of future large-scale quantum computers involving silicon materials of industrial relevance and quantum simulators, which are anticipated to be one of the first technological applications of quantum information.

He is distinguished in the field for the invention [Physical Review Letters 2016, and US patent US9691033B2] and first experimental demonstration [Nature Materials 2021, Phys.org] of ultra-long-lived quantum bits with strong intrinsic spin-orbit coupling, which allows electric control of spin. This is advantageous for building large-scale quantum information technologies. He has also performed the first proof-of-principal experimental demonstration of analog quantum simulation of the Fermi-Hubbard model with spins in silicon.

In 2023, Joe was awarded $4.9m to lead a pan-Canadian consortium with the Université de Sherbrooke, the University of Waterloo, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, and McGill University. The consortium aims to advance the science and technology of quantum computation in Canada via the design, fabrication, and investigation of a new quantum processor, the key technological component of a quantum computer.

In 2015, Joe was awarded a prestigious Discovery Early Career Fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) in Sydney, Australia. Before that, Joe was a postdoctoral fellow at UNSW Sydney. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Toronto in 2011.

Read more about Joe’s research here.