Paul Kwiat, LabEscape named to international Quantum 100 list

Illinois Grainger Engineering physicist Paul Kwiat has been named to the Quantum 100 – a list celebrating the diverse people shaping quantum science and technology around the world – for his important quantum research and for creating LabEscape, an innovative outreach effort in which participants must use concepts from quantum physics to solve an escape room.

Sponsored by UNESCO as part of its 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology initiative, Quantum 100 recognizes the diverse people driving global innovation in quantum science and technology through research, art, communication, education, policy, public engagement, industry and philanthropy.

In addition to his global renown as a quantum researcher and technologist, Kwiat is passionate about public outreach. Quantum 100 recognizes his “seminal contributions to quantum physics” and his “unique and creative approach to public engagement,” specifically citing LabEscape.

“At least according to the opinions of past LabEscape participants, this seems to be a very effective method to engage the public and simultaneously inform them of the coming quantum revolution,” Kwiat said. “One recent participant said, ‘To be honest, I don’t really like science that much, but this was really fun, and quantum is amazing!’ We’re so grateful to have the opportunity to share that with everyone.”

LabEscape is “the world’s first quantum-themed science-based escape room.” As featured in The New York Times and Scientific American, LabEscape demystifies quantum science by turning complex physics concepts into puzzles that can be solved without any prior knowledge, requiring only curiosity, communication and collaboration. Over 16,000 visitors have participated since it was founded in 2016.

While the experience is based in Urbana, Illinois, Kwiat and his team have run LabEscape at the Wisconsin Science Festival, the Illinois State Fair, the Quantum World Congress, the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo and many other science conferences.

As a researcher, Kwiat established himself as an expert in quantum science from his doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, where he experimentally studied quantum effects in nonlinear optics. He completed postdoctoral work at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in the research group of Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger. He then worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory as an Oppenheimer Fellow before becoming a technical staff member in the laboratory’s Physics Division. In 2001, he came to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as the second John Bardeen Chair in Physics and Electrical Engineering.

Kwiat’s research achievements include seminal work on the generation, detection, and applications of entanglement, the quintessential quantum phenomenon. He has developed optical realizations of many quantum information protocols including quantum cryptography, dense-coding, quantum teleportation, entanglement distillation and quantum gates. Currently, he is pioneering the development of quantum technology for space, having just celebrated the one year anniversary of the Space Entanglement and Annealing QUantum Experiment (SEAQUE), an entanglement source on the International Space Station. This is the first U.S.-led quantum entanglement source in space.

He was the inaugural director of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center when it formed in 2018, and he continues to support the development of quantum science and technology at Illinois and through collaborations with the Chicago Quantum Exchange and Q-NEXT, a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Argonne National Laboratory.