Chris Heunen
Professor of Quantum Programming at the University of Edinburgh
Research Interests:
Quantum Programming Languages
Distributed Quantum Computing
Category Theory
Chris Heunen is the Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Quantum Informatics, and the Director of Talent in the QSL. He has a background in foundations of quantum informatics and programming semantics, with over 90 published research articles in top venues across computer science (LICS, POPL, ICALP), physics (PRL, PNAS), and mathematics (Advances in Mathematics, Journal of Functional Analysis). For example, he developed the first general and optimal algorithm to distribute quantum circuits over interconnected quantum systems, now used in industry standard quantum compilers. His book Categories for Quantum Theory with Jamie Vicary is used in at least 6 university courses. His work was awarded the 2012 Birkhoff-von Neumann prize, and has been funded by NWO and EPSRC Fellowships. He founded and chairs the Quantum Software Alliance, is a founding editor and sits on the steering board of the journal Quantum, serves as area editor for quantum computing for the ACM Transactions in Computational Logic, and is part of the IFIP Working Group on Foundations of Quantum Computation.
Featured Publications:
"Free Quantum Computing", J. Carette, C. Heunen, R. Kaarsgaard, N. J. Ross, and A. Sabry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123(8):e2510881123, 2026. Free Quantum Computing
"One rig to control them all", C. Heunen, L. Lemonnier, and R. Kaarsgaard, Logic in Computer Science 2026, LIPIcs 380:56. https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.LICS.2026.56
"Quantum circuits are just a phase", C. Heunen, L. Lemonnier, C. McNally, and A. Rice, ACM Principles of Programming Languages 10(89):2586-2613, 2026 https://doi.org/10.1145/3776731
"Axioms for the category of Hilbert spaces", C. Heunen and A. Kornell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119(9):e2117024119, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117024119
Current PhD students:
Kengo Hirata, Kim Worrall, Maria Gragera Garces, Aristomenis Zazanis