Patrick Hayden is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in the Physics of Information. Prior to joining McGill in 2004, he spent three years as a Sherman Fairchild Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He obtained his D.Phil. in Physics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from McGill. His current fascination with quantum information processing was foreshadowed early; as a high school student, he worked summers writing networking software and graphics code for an operating systems company with the curiously prescient, if premature, name Quantum Software Systems. In 2007, he received a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Dr. Hayden's research focuses on finding efficient methods for performing the communication tasks that will be required for large-scale quantum information processing. This includes methods for reliably sending quantum states through noisy media, methods for reliably encrypting or otherwise protecting quantum information from unauthorized manipulation, and protocols to enable multiple parties to process quantum information with a minimum of communication.