Professor Scott Aaronson

Professor of Computer Science at University of Texas at Austin

Scott Joel Aaronson (born May 21, 1981) is an American theoretical computer scientist and David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. After post doctorates at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, he took a faculty position at MIT in 2007. 

His primary area of research is quantum computing and computational complexity theory more generally. In the summer of 2016 he moved from MIT to the University of Texas at Austin as David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science and as the founding director of UT Austin's new Quantum Information Centre.

Major Awards:

• Aaronson is one of two winners of the 2012 Alan T. Waterman Award.
• Best Student Paper Awards at the Computational Complexity Conference for the papers "Limitations of Quantum Advice and One-Way Communication" (2004) and "Quantum Certificate Complexity" (2003).
• 2017 Simons Investigator
• He was awarded the 2020 ACM Prize in Computing "for ground-breaking contributions to quantum computing"