California physicist and Nobel laureate John Martinis won’t quit on quantum computers

A California physicist and Nobel laureate who laid the foundation for quantum computing isn’t done working.

For the last 40 years, John Martinis has worked — mostly within California — to create the fastest computers ever built.

“It’s kind of my professional dream to do this by the time I’m really too old to retire. I should retire now, but I’m not doing that,” the now 67-year-old said.

Born and raised in San Pedro, Martinis said his California high school teachers influenced him to pursue his career. A physics teacher got him interested in the topic, he said, and a math teacher taught him rigor, work ethic and organization.

“I think before then I’d just write down the solution” rather than showing his process, he joked in an interview with The Times.

As an undergraduate senior at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, he met John Clarke, a British physicist and professor who would become his graduate advisor, and Michel Devoret, a French physicist who worked with him as a postdoctoral researcher.

“This was a fantastic experience, to be mentored by two wonderful people,” he said during a news conference Tuesday at UC Santa Barbara, where he works as a professor. “I learned so much from them that, through my whole career, I was kind of trying to re-create that spirit that we had in there.”

Martinis was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics, alongside Clarke and Devoret, for his doctoral project, a series of experiments in the mid-1980s that proved quantum tunneling was possible with large objects, which became the basis for the development of quantum computers as well as much of the current research in that field.

Both Clarke and Devoret are based in the U.S. and associated with the University of California system — Clarke as a professor emeritus at Berkeley and Devoret as a professor at UC Santa Barbara.

“I loved Berkeley. It was great to be taught by these really amazing professors,” Martinis said, noting the university’s cutting-edge facilities that supported the experiments. “As a student, I could focus on just being a good scientist.”

Martinis went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship in France, then returned stateside to Boulder, Colo., where he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a U.S. government lab. In 2008 he moved back to California to work at UC Santa Barbara as a professor, and in 2014, Google hired him and Devoret to create an experimental quantum processor faster than any human supercomputer — which his team completed five years later.

“It really was all this basic research we did for decades that enabled this to happen and enabled us to have a vision … to build this thing,” Martinis said.

He chose UC Santa Barbara as a workplace not just because of the great location and weather, but also for its advanced facilities and community. Researchers from other disciplines — such as engineers and materials scientists who build semiconductors — are able to freely communicate and collaborate with his team.

“Working with talented and friendly people at the university is really special,” he said. “You can actually get things done.”

Martinis said he has enjoyed hearing back from former students who have reached out to celebrate his award. Speaking to students years after they take his classes and grasp the effect on their lives has been refreshing. His work over the years has spawned an industry that created thousands of well-paying jobs for people across the country, he said.

He praised the UC system for its culture and collaboration with the private sector and government, but said that research and development for quantum computers in the U.S. must urgently speed up if we expect to see it in our lifetimes.

After leaving Google in 2020, Martinis co-founded his private company, QoLab, in 2022 with a belief that advanced semiconductor chips are the path to achieving usable quantum computers. The company has begun collaborating with other startup companies and academic groups involved in semiconductor production, he said.

“I think this collaborative model is going to be more fruitful because we really get a lot of interesting ideas,” Martinis said. “We have a lot to catch up on. But it’s a very good atmosphere to invent things.”