This lecture series is hosted by the Chief Executives’ Club at Queen’s and the Royal Irish Academy, and supported by the Queen’s School of Mathematics and Physics.

The event will take place online, facilitated by The Chief Executives' Club at Queen's University in association with the School of Maths and Physics at Queen's and The Royal Irish Academy.

1.30pm - Introduction from Professor Chris Johnson, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast

1.35pm - 'Quantum Reality' - Keynote address from Professor Vlatko Vedral FInstP, Professor of Quantum Information Science at University of Oxford

2.10pm - Q&A Session, hosted by Professor Mauro Paternostro, Head of School of Maths and Physics, Queen's University Belfast

2.45pm - Closing of session, Dr Mary Canning, President of the Royal Irish Academy

About the Speaker

Vlatko Vedral (PhD and BSc at Imperial College) is a professor of quantum information at Oxford and professor of physics at the National University of Singapore. He has published over 350 research papers on various topics in quantum physics and quantum computing and is one of the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers.

He has given numerous invited plenary and public talks during his career. These include a specialised talk at a Solvay meeting (2010) and a popular one at the International Safe Scientifique (2007). He was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007, the World Scientific Medal and Prize in 2009, the Marko Jaric Award in 2010. Vlatko was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2017 and a member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2020. He has held many visiting professorships, among which are those held at the Universities of Vienna and Belo Horizonte, the Perimeter Institute in Canada and the Institute for the Scientific Interchange in Turin.

Vlatko consults the World Economic Forum on the Future of Computation. Vlatko is the author of 4 textbooks and 2 popular books (“Decoding Reality” and “From Micro to Macro”). He gives regular interviews to the media and is actively engaged in popularization of physics also by writing for New Scientist, Scientific American and major UK and overseas newspapers.