Prof Dr Kristel Michielsen

Prof Dr Kristel Michielsen, a computational physicist, received her PhD from the University of Groningen (Netherlands) in 1993 for work on the simulation of strongly correlated electron systems. She is director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich, holds the chair for Quantum Computing and Modular Supercomputing at the University of Cologne, and is the head of the research group Quantum Information Processing, of the division HPC for Quantum Systems and of the quantum computer user facility JUNIQ - Jülich Unified Infrastructure for Quantum computing - at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Kristel Michielsen and her research group have ample experience in performing large-scale simulations of quantum computers and annealers and in benchmarking and studying prototype applications for this new compute technology in optimization, simulation, machine learning and quantum AI. With her group and a team of international collaborators, she set the world record in simulating a quantum computer with 48 qubits. In 2019, she participated in a research collaboration that proved Google’s quantum supremacy. With deep expertise in HPC and quantum computing, she has played a pioneering role in bringing quantum computing to the HPC community and integrating both types of computing.