2023 Quantum Electronics Award Recipient Announced

Hoi Kwong Lo

We are delighted to announce that Hoi-Kwong Lo of the University of Toronto and the University of Hong Kong, has been chosen as the IEEE Photonics Society Quantum Electronics Award.

For establishing the theoretical and experimental foundation for practical quantum cryptography and quantum network.

Hoi-Kwong Lo is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Toronto and a Chair Professor of Physics at the University of Hong Kong. He is also a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Quantum Bridge Technologies, Inc. (Quantum Bridge) in Toronto.

He received B. A. in Mathematics from Cambridge University in 1989 and Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech in 1994. After spending time at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, he became a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Hewlett-Packard Labs from 1997 to 1999. He was the Chief Scientist and Senior VP at a quantum start-up, MagiQ Technology, Inc from 1999 to 2002. From 2003 to 2020, he worked full time at the University of Toronto and has been a tenured Full Professor there since 2009. He has been a Chair Professor of Physics at HKU in 2020-23. He co-founded the quantum start-up Quantum Bridge in 2019.

He is a pioneer in the field of quantum information and quantum cryptography and was among the first in the world to establish three fundamental results: 1) to prove the information-theoretic security of QKD, 2) to co-invent quantum secret sharing and 3) to prove the impossibility of quantum bit commitment. His research group at the U. of Toronto was the first in the world to implement experimentally the decoy state QKD protocol in 2005 and successfully hack commercial QKD systems (around 2008-2010). In 2012, he co-invented the novel protocol measurement-device-independent (MQI-QKD), which is widely regarded as a breakthrough in the field. Recently, his research group and collaborators invented and experimentally implemented a proof-of-principle demonstration of all photonics quantum repeaters and experimentally implemented the novel twin-field QKD protocol.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), an Optica Fellow (OSA), and has been awarded the 2022 CAP-INO Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Applied Photonics.