Birgitta Whaley

Professor of Chemistry; Director, Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center

Birgitta Whaley is Professor of Chemical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley and Director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center. Born in 1956, she earned her B.A. from Oxford University in 1978, where she studied as a Nuffield Scholar, before continuing at Harvard University as a Kennedy Fellow. She later completed both her M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1982 and 1984, respectively. Following her doctoral work, she held research fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University before beginning her academic career in the United States.

Over the course of her career, Whaley has received numerous distinctions recognizing her contributions to chemical physics and quantum science, including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and appointments as a Miller Professor at UC Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She has also served in major leadership roles within the American Physical Society and on advisory boards for institutions including the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Whaley’s research lies at the intersection of chemistry, physics, biology, and information science, with broad emphasis on quantum information, quantum computation, and the control of complex quantum systems. Her work explores how uniquely quantum phenomena—such as superposition, entanglement, and probabilistic measurement—can be harnessed for information processing, simulation, and precision measurement technologies beyond the capabilities of classical systems.

Her theoretical research spans quantum control, quantum measurement, open quantum systems, quantum metrology, and macroscopic quantum states. Current areas of interest in her group include quantum feedback control, quantum reservoir engineering, topological quantum computation, and the study of large-scale quantum superposition states in interacting many-body systems.

In recent years, Whaley has also become a leading figure in the emerging field of quantum biology. Her research investigates how quantum dynamical effects may influence biological processes, combining methods from quantum physics, molecular quantum mechanics, and quantum information science to better understand the role of coherence and quantum behavior in living systems.

Through her interdisciplinary work, Whaley has helped shape modern research at the frontier of quantum science, advancing both fundamental understanding and emerging applications of quantum phenomena across physics, chemistry, and biology.