Pedram Roushan

Pedram Roushan is an Iranian-American physicist working at Google AI on quantum computing and quantum simulation.

Pedram Roushan was born in Sari, Iran in 1978 and raised in Iran. His family belonged to the Baháʼí Faith and suffered prosecution and discrimination after the Islamic Revolution. Roushan's parents were laid-off from their jobs due to their beliefs, and his father had to spend several years in hiding. In 1984 and to escape the persecution, with his family they lived in a small village close to Gilan province, where Roushan attended elementary school. In 1996, Roushan was denied access to Iranian universities. He enrolled at the Baháʼí Institute for Higher Education, where he obtained a degree in civil engineering.

In 2001 and with the help of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS), he moved to the US as a religious refugee and attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2005. He completed his PhD in the group of Ali Yazdani at Princeton University in 2011, where he studies diluted magnetic semiconductors and also performed the first scanning tunneling microscopy on the surface of topological insulators. He then moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara as a postdoc, where he worked in John Martinis' group on building a quantum computer based on superconducting qubits. In 2014 he joined Google together with the Martinis team and was part of the group performing the first claimed quantum supremacy demonstration on Google's Sycamore processor.

He is currently a Staff Research Scientist with Google and leads the experimental effort on noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) algorithms, focusing on simulating quantum phenomena on NISQ processors. With his team and their collaborators, they have studied information scrambling in quantum circuits, non-equilibrium dynamics and universality classes in quantum spin models, phases of matter away from equilibrium, e.g. time crystals and measurement-induced entanglement phases, quantum statistics of abelian and non-abelian excitations of the Kitaev toric code model.

As of November 2023, Roushan has published more than 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals which have been cited over 25,000 times (h-index of 50).