Professor Wolfgang Tittel received his PhD from the University of Geneva in 2000, joined the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology at the University of Calgary in 2006 as Associate Professor and Industrial Research Chair, and became Full Professor in 2013. In 2018 he accepted a position at QuTech at the Delft University of Technology and, since January 2023, he is a Professor and Chair affiliated both with the University of Geneva and Constructor Institute of Technology Schaffhausen.

Dr. Tittel has engaged in groundbreaking research in quantum communication from the early stages on. His work stretches across atomic and optical physics and has raised appreciation that quantum communication is not restricted to controlled laboratory settings. For instance, the “plug&play” QKD system, which he co-developed as a PhD student, was subsequently commercialized by idQuantique; and the American Physical Society selected the distribution of entangled photons over ten kilometers of deployed fibres (which he also did as a PhD student) in their review “A century of physics” to be a “Highlight 1997”, and the first field demonstration of “Measurement-Device Independent Quantum Key Distribution” (performed as a Professor at the University of Calgary) to belong to the most important achievements in 2013. Moreover, his 2011 paper on the storage of members from entangled photon pairs in a rare-earth-doped crystal, and the 2016 demonstration of quantum teleportation across a metropolitan fibre network (both performed as a Professor) received media coverage all over the world.

His current research interests include the interaction between photons and rare-earth crystals—including for optical quantum memory, sources of quantum light as well as quantum information processing—, nano-photonics, quantum repeaters and quantum networks.