team

Scott Aaronson is a Partner at Blanqet. He is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center.  Previously, he was on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied at Cornell and University of California, Berkeley, and did postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as the University of Waterloo.   

His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally.  His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. Aaronson has written about quantum computing for Scientific American and the New York Times and writes a popular blog. He’s received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, and MIT’s Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching.  Aaronson was a Simons Investigator and was awarded the 2020 ACM Prize in Computing "for ground-breaking contributions to quantum computing."

David Awschalom is a Founding Partner of Blanqet. He is the Liew Family Professor and Vice Dean of the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and Director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. He is also the inaugural Director of Q-NEXT, one of the US Department of Energy Quantum Information Science Research Centers. Previously, he was the Peter J. Clarke Director of the California NanoSystems Institute and Professor at the University of California – Santa Barbara. He also served as a Research Staff and Manager at the IBM Watson Research Center.

Awschalom explores the quantum behavior of electrons, nuclei, and photons in semiconductors and molecules for quantum information processing, communication and sensing. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University.

Yevgeniy Dodis is a Consulting Scientist at Blanqet. He is a Professor of Computer Science at New York University. He is a Fellow of the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research), the recipient of 2021 and 2019 IACR Test-of-Time Awards, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Faculty Awards from Facebook, Google, IBM, Algorand, Protocol Labs, JP Morgan, Stellar Foundation and VMware, and Best Paper Award at 2005 Public Key Cryptography Conference. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT.

Dr. Dodis' research is primarily in cryptography and network security. He worked in a variety of areas, including random number generation, secure messaging, leakage-resilient cryptography, cryptography under weak randomness, cryptography with biometrics and other noisy data, hash function and block cipher design, protocol composition and information-theoretic cryptography. Some of his work on Random Number Generation, Hash Functions and Secure Messaging has had real-world impact (e.g., for Zoom, Microsoft, Apple and Signal, among others).

Bill Fefferman is a Founding Partner of Blanqet. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Fefferman’s research explores the power of quantum computers in both the near-term and the indefinite future. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award (2020), a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (2018), and a Google Scholar Award (2022). Before coming to Chicago he held research positions at the University of Maryland/NIST and at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech 

Sean Hallgren is a Partner at Blanqet. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State University. He is the recipient of a PECASE award from NSF and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from DoD. Prior to joining Penn State he led the quantum computing group at NEC Laboratories. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley.

Hallgren's interests are in determining the strengths and limitations of quantum computers, particularly in finding problems that have an efficient quantum algorithm but where no efficient classical algorithm is known. This naturally overlaps with his interests in post-quantum cryptography, where developing cryptography secure against quantum computers is the goal.

Liang Jiang is a Founding Partner of Blanqet and a professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on using quantum control and error correction to protect quantum information from decoherence, aiming to realize robust quantum information processing for computing, communication, and sensing. Jiang received his BS from Caltech in 2004 and his PhD from Harvard University in 2009. He served as a faculty member at Yale University from 2012 to 2019. Jiang is a fellow of the American Physical Society and also a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship, and the APS Landauer-Bennett Award.

Alex Lubotzky is a member of Blanqet's advisory board.  He is a professor at the Weizmann Institute.  Lubotzky is a mathematician working mainly in group theory and its connections with number theory, geometry, combinatorics and computer science.  He is one of the co-inventors of Ramanujan graphs and of error correcting codes with constant rate, distance, and locality.

Among many honors, Lubotzky is as an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Israeli Academy of Science, and the Hungarian Academy of Science.  He received an Honorary Degree from the University of Chicago for his contribution to modern mathematics and 2018 he received the Israel Prize for "influencing many fields in mathematics and computer science, especially in the area of expander graphs and their applications".  

He has served on numerous international scientific committees, was a member of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) from 1996 to1999 and was former president of the Israeli Mathematical Union.

Andrew M. Rosenfield is a Founding Partner of Blanqet. He is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the president of Guggenheim Partners, which he joined as Managing Partner. Rosenfield is a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and is one of America’s foremost scholars on antitrust law. He is a member of the board of trustees of The University of Chicago, vice-chairman of the board of trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a past member of the board of The Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Rosenfield began his business career while still a student at the University of Chicago when he co-founded Lexecon Inc. with Richard Posner and William Landes. He led that firm as its chief executive officer for more than 20 years until its sale. Rosenfield founded UNext Inc., an early online education business, and served as its chief executive officer until it was acquired by early investor Knowledge Universe. UNext partnered with Columbia University, The London School of Economics, Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford University and The University of Chicago. Rosenfield also was chief executive officer of TGG Group, which he co-founded with Gary Becker, Daniel Kahneman and Steve Levitt.

Shmuel Weinberger is a Founding Partner of Blanqet. He is the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics at University of Chicago, where, aside from short positions at Princeton and Penn, he has spent most of his career. He has written four books on topology and its connections to other parts of mathematics with an emphasis in recent years on the development of quantitative tools in topology, and an understanding of how imposing constraints on resources impacts the solvability of geometric problems

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Weinberger also has been active in developing applications of topology outside of mathematics. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Applied and Computational Topology, where he remains on the scientific board. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received his BA (class of 82) and PhD (1983) from New York University. He has held positions at Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and visiting positions at Hebrew University, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley) and NYU.