John Preskill is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and Director of the Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech. Preskill received his A.B. in physics in 1975 from Princeton, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1980 from Harvard.

He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and Associate Professor of Physics at Harvard before joining the Caltech faculty in 1983; he became the John D. MacArthur Professor in 2002, and the Richard P. Feynman Professor in 2010. Until the mid-1990s, Preskill’s research focused on elementary particles, cosmology, and gravitation. Since then his research has focused primarily on quantum computation and quantum information theory. Preskill is a two-time recipient of the Associated Students of Caltech Teaching Award, and he has mentored more than 40 Ph.D. students at Caltech, many of whom are now leaders in their research areas.