Peter Zoller - Biography#

Peter Zoller studied physics at the University of Innsbruck, obtained his doctorate there in February 1977, and became a lecturer at their Institute of Theoretical Physics.

For 1978/79, he was granted a Max Kade stipend to research with Peter Lambropoulos at the University of Southern California. In 1980, he stayed in Auckland, New Zealand, as a researcher with the group around Dan Walls. In 1981, Peter Zoller handed in his book “Über die lichtstatistische Abhängigkeit resonanter Multiphoton-Prozesse” at the University of Innsbruck to qualify as a professor by receiving the “venia docendi”.

He spent 1981/82 and 1988 as Visiting Fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and 1986 as guest professor at the Université de Paris-Sud 11, Orsay. In 1991, Peter Zoller was appointed Professor of Physics and JILA Fellow at JILA and at the Physics Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder. At the end of 1994, he accepted a chair at the University of Innsbruck, where he has worked ever since. From 1995 to 1999, he was head of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, from 2001 to 2004, he was vice-dean of studies.

Peter Zoller continues to keep in close touch with JILA as Adjoint Fellow. Numerous guest professorships have taken him to all major centres of physics throughout the world.

He was Loeb lecturer in Harvard, Boston, MA (2004), Yan Jici chair professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, and chair professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing (2004), as well as Lorentz professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands (2005). In 2012, he became “Distinguished Fellow” at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Munich. Since 2003, Peter Zoller has also held the position of Scientific Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.