Gerardo Ortiz is a Professor of Physics at Indiana University in Bloomington and leads, along with Amr Sabry and a few other faculty members, the new Center for Quantum Information, Science and Engineering. His research work is in condensed matter physics and quantum information science. A great challenge of theoretical physics is understanding and modeling interacting quantum many-body systems or quantum fields, and accurately predicting properties and functionalities of matter from the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum technologies are no longer a theorist's dream. Thereof stems a long-standing interest in studying foundational, software, and hardware aspects of quantum computation and information.

Prof Ortiz is also interested in topics of potential overlap between the two research disciplines, where feedback from one field may help to resolve significant problems in the other. After all, a quantum computer is a quantum many-body system. What are the concepts from quantum information that one can use to study or predict phenomena in condensed matter physics? Similarly, what concepts can be borrowed from condensed matter to quantify measures of information? Prof. Gerardo Ortiz has co-authored one book (in the Oxford Graduate Texts series) and for the last six years he has offered (in Spring, in the Physics Department), a graduate level Quantum Information and Quantum Computation course (P555) open to advanced and motivated Math and CSCI graduate students.