About me
Francesco Petruccione is a distinguished physicist and professor with a rich academic history. He commenced his academic journey at the University of Freiburg i. Br., earning his PhD in 1988 followed by the “Habilitation” degree (Dr. rer. nat. habil.) in 1994. In 2004, he accepted a position as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, South Africa. His notable roles there included serving as Pro-Vice-Chancellor Big Data and Informatics. By 2007, Prof. Petruccione was recognized with the South African Research Chair for Quantum Information Processing and Communication. Currently, he holds dual roles as the Director of the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences and, since May 2022, as a Professor of Quantum Computing at Stellenbosch University, while also retaining a fractional professorship at UKZN. Prof Petruccione co-leads the Africa Europe Cluster of Research Excellence in Addressing Global and African Challenges through Methods from Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Theoretical and Computational Thinking (CoRE-AI).