Patrick Coles is a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), New Mexico. He leads the near-term quantum computing research efforts at LANL, focusing on variational quantum algorithms and quantum machine learning. He also co-organizes LANL's quantum computing summer school. He has switched fields many times: He received his master's degree in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, UK, as a Churchill Scholar and then did his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In contrast, his three postdocs (at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania; the National University of Singapore; and the University of Waterloo, Canada) were focused on all things quantum, including quantum foundations, quantum optics, quantum information theory, quantum cryptography, and (his current field) quantum computing.
