Who we are

Prof Bob Coecke

Prof Coecke is Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at the Computer Science Department and the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University.

Previously he was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, where he was 20 years. During this time, he co-founded and led a multi-disciplinary Quantum Group that grew to 50 members and has supervised 70 PhD students. He then moved to industry, serving as Chief Scientist at Quantinuum, where he was the inventor of Quantum NLP & Compositional Intelligence.

He continues to supervise students at Oxford and elsewhere, and still teaches at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute. He pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now included in AMS’s MSC2020 classification), ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and DisCoCirc natural language meaning.

He co-authored Picturing Quantum Processes (with Aleks Kissinger), which provides a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. He also co-authored Quantum in Pictures, with Stefano Gogioso (with Stefano Gogioso), which presents quantum theory diagrammatically in a form accessible to people with no maths background. He has co-authored some 200 research papers.

He is a founding father of the QPL (Quantum Physics and Logic) and ACT (Applied Category Theory) communities, serves on the steering boards of QPL, ACT and QISS (Quantum Information Structure of Spacetime), and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of FQxI.

He founded the diamond-open-access journal Compositionality, and the Cambridge University Press book series on Applied Category Theory. He was the first person to hold “Quantum Foundations” as part of his official academic title.

He obtained approximately 35 research grants, including funding from NFWO, EPSRC, Leverhulme, EU, ONR, AFOSR, FQXi, JTF.

His work has been headlined by various major media outlets including Forbes, New Scientist, Physics World, Computer Weekly, IFL Science, The Guardian.

Dr Selma Coecke

Dr Dündar-Coecke is a developmental cognitive scientist with a longstanding interest in multidisciplinary approaches to education. She began her career as a teacher before transitioning to a faculty position after completing her first MSc at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey. Following her first PhD in education sciences, she undertook a sabbatical at the University of Zurich in 2012, where she collaborated with physicists from CERN to investigate the implications of quantum theory for education and cognition.

Subsequently, she joined the University of Oxford as an academic visitor at Quantum Group and pursued a second MSc in Educational Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London. She then secured ESRC funding for her second PhD in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the Institute of Education, University College London.

Her research focuses on the cognitive processes underlying human educability and reasoning, educational interventions, and brain stimulation techniques. She is a Chartered Psychologist and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a member of the American Psychological Association, and the Cognitive Development Society. She also teaches the ‘Psychology and Learning’ module at master’s level at the School of Education, Communication & Society, Kings’ College, London.

Dr Dündar-Coecke specializes in translating advanced and emerging scientific research into practical educational innovation, early skills and workforce development, knowledge transfer, the adoption of emerging technologies, and strategies for talent cultivation. Her work extends beyond cognitive science to explore how humans and machines develop intelligence.

She co-organizes the four-yearly Causal Cognition in Humans and Machines conference series in Oxford, UK, which advances research and implementations at the intersection of Cognitive Science and AI.

She incorporates insights from Quantum Information Sciences and Technologies (QIST) to investigate how quantum advancements can transform educational methodologies, introducing novel paradigms for teaching and learning complex concepts. A pioneering project ‘Quantum Picturalism’ (QPic) unites a highly interdisciplinary team of experts. Initially funded by Quantinuum, the University of Oxford, IBM, and City University London, the project is now funded by the U.S. Air Force to expand to U.S. participants, where she serves as the educational lead and Co-PI.

Dr hab. John H. Selby

Dr Selby leads the Compositional Foundations of Physics research team at the International Centre for Theory of Quantum Technologies hosted by the University of Gdańsk, Poland. He holds degrees in Physics from the University of Gdańsk (habilitation, 2025), Imperial College London (PhD, 2017; MRes, 2014; MSci, 2012), and the University of Waterloo (MSc, 2013).

His research is focused on the foundations of physics, seeking to answer questions such as: “how do we know that nature is non-classical?”, “is there any deeper theory of nature than quantum theory?” and “what is the best way to understand quantum theory?”. He doesn’t know the answers to any of these yet, but is convinced that diagrammatic methods and process based thinking will be a part of it .

Dr Lia Yeh

Dowling Fellowship Research Associate, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge

Lia Yeh is a Dowling Fellowship Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Her research formalizes the intersection of quantum computer architectures, quantum error correction, quantum graphical calculi, and models of quantum computation. Her broader research interests include quantum algorithms for physics and chemistry, quantum circuit synthesis and complexity, and quantum education.

In recognition of her doctoral research at the University of Oxford on the university’s flagship Clarendon scholarship, she was awarded a Google PhD Fellowship. During her PhD, she worked half-time for three years as a Research Scientist at Quantinuum. In addition to her research, she is known for her contributions to non-profit and open-source initiatives, and to the founding and long-term development of the Quantum Science and Engineering Education Conference.

Dr Muhammed Hamza Waseem

Dr Waseem completed his DPhil in Physics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and subsequently worked as a Research Scientist in the quantum computing industry.

He currently serves as Faculty Lead for Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University London. During his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering in Pakistan, he helped establish the country’s first single-photon quantum physics laboratory and co-authored Quantum Mechanics in the Single-Photon Laboratory (Institute of Physics), now in its second edition.

He has taught Quantum in Pictures in both the UK and Pakistan. His contributions to physics education and public engagement have been recognised with the Public Engagement with Research Impact Award (MPLS, Oxford), the Diana Award, and a Public Engagement Award (South East Physics Network).

Dr Quanlong Wang

Dr Wang is a senior researcher bridging the worlds of mathematics and computer science. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a DPhil in Computer Science from the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on the development of graphical languages for applications in quantum computing and machine learning, seeking to simplify complex computational structures through visual and mathematical frameworks.