Bei Zeng received the B.Sc. degree in physics and mathematics and M.Sc. degree in physics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2002 and 2004, respectively. She received the Ph.D. degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, in 2009. From 2009 to 2010, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In 2010, she joined the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, as an assistant professor, and promoted to Tenured Associate Professor in 2014 and Professor in 2018.
Xie Chen is an Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Chen obtained her Ph.D. degree from MIT in 2012 and was a Miller research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley for two yearsbefore joining Caltech in 2014. Dr. Chen is interested in studying quantum mechanical systems with a large number of degrees of freedom and how the constituent degrees of freedom cooperate with each other to realize amazing emergent phenomena, both at equilibrium and in dynamical processes. Dr. Chen was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship and the NSF Faculty Early Career Award in 2017.
Duan-Lu Zhou is a Professor of physics at the Institute of Physics, Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter, Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and also teaches at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His main research interest is in quantum physics and quantum information, where he has published 70 academic papers.
Xiao-Gang Wen is a theoretical condensed matter physicist, recognized for his work on introducing the notion topological order (1989) and developing the theories of this new class of quantum states of matter. He is known particularly for his theoretical discovery of perfect conducting 1D chiral Luttinger liquids, Z2 spin liquid with emergent fermion, non-abelian fractional quantum Hall states for topological quantum computation, symmetry protected topological order, and string-net unification of elementary particles and interactions. Since 2000, the study of topological states of matter slowly became a very active new field in condensed matter physics. Wen enter the graduate school of Princeton University in 1982, and earned a Ph.D degree in the field of superstring theory under Prof. Witten. During his postdoctoral period (1987-1989) in ITP, Santa Barbara, he started to pursue research in condensed matter physics. After a two-years stay in IAS, Princeton, he joined the faculty of department of Physics, MIT in 1991. He was a Distinguished Moore Scholar at Caltech (2006). Newton Chair at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (2012 – 2014). He was awarded Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize by APS in 2017, and Dirac Medal by ICTP in 2018. He is a Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT since 2004, and became a member of National Academy of Science in 2018.