Pedram Roushan

Timeline

1. 1996–2005

   Refugee student at Pittsburgh

   Born in Sari, Iran, in 1978, he is denied access to Iranian universities in 1996 and earns a civil engineering degree at the Baháʼí Institute for Higher Education. He moves to the United States in 2001 as a religious refugee, works in Xiao-lun Wu's fluid dynamics lab at the University of Pittsburgh, and graduates summa cum laude in 2005.

2. 2011–2014

   Princeton PhD and Martinis postdoc

   He completes a PhD in Ali Yazdani's group at Princeton University in 2011, including the first scanning tunneling microscopy on the surface of topological insulators. He then spends three years as a postdoctoral researcher in John Martinis's lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, working on a quantum computer based on superconducting qubits.

3. 2014

   Joining Google's quantum hardware lab

   He joins the Google Quantum AI team in 2014, moving to Google together with the Martinis team to work in the quantum hardware lab that aims to create a quantum computer.

4. 2017

   Spectroscopy on nine superconducting qubits

   In 2017, he is first author of a paper that uses a chain of nine superconducting qubits to resolve the energy levels of interacting photons directly. At strong disorder, the level statistics approach a Poisson distribution, the hallmark of the transition to the many-body localized phase.

5. 2019

   Sycamore and quantum supremacy

   He is among the authors of the 2019 Nature paper that reports quantum supremacy on Google's Sycamore processor. The processor creates states on 53 qubits and takes about 200 seconds to sample a circuit a million times, a task that benchmarks put at approximately 10,000 years for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer.

6. 2021–2022

   Time crystals and non-Abelian braiding

   In November 2021, he is a corresponding author of a Nature paper that observes a many-body-localized discrete time crystal on an array of superconducting qubits. In October 2022, he is among the authors of a preprint on braiding non-Abelian anyons in a superconducting processor, which implements a generalized stabilizer code to create and braid Ising anyons.

7. 2024–2025

   Willow error correction and OTOCs

   In December 2024, he is among the authors of the Google Quantum AI Nature paper on below-threshold surface code memories on the Willow processor, which includes a 101-qubit distance-7 code. In October 2025, he is among the authors of the Nature paper that measures second-order out-of-time-order correlators on a superconducting quantum processor and finds constructive interference between Pauli strings.

8. As of October 2026

   Staff Research Scientist at Google

   He is a Staff Research Scientist at Google Quantum AI and leads the experimental effort on noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) algorithms. Since 2019, he leads NISQ experiments on time-crystalline ordering, topological states, a bound state of photons and the braiding of non-Abelian anyons. His team's current focus is non-equilibrium quantum dynamics beyond the capability of classical computers.