Isaac L. Chuang is an American electrical engineer and physicist. He is a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He earned his undergraduate degrees in physics in 1990 and electrical engineering in 1991, as well as a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1991, all from MIT. In 1997, he received a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Chuang is one of the early developers of NMR quantum computing. Later, he worked on trapped ion quantum computing after NMR quantum computing became less popular because of high levels of noise, which limited its ability to grow beyond tens of qubits.

In 2008, Chuang was the main researcher for a doctoral-study program in quantum information science. As part of this program, MIT received a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create a new graduate training program.

Chuang and Michael Nielsen are known for writing Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, a key reference book in quantum computing.

While working at IBM in 1999, Chuang was to appear in a film by Errol Morris, which IBM had planned for an internal conference in 2000. The conference was canceled, and the film was never finished. However, excerpts from the film are available on Morris’s personal website.

In 2015, Chuang led a study that found some students on the edX platform cheated by making multiple accounts to "harvest" correct answers.

Honors

• In 2010, he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
• In 1999, he was selected for the MIT Technology Review TR100, which recognizes the world's top 100 innovators younger than 35.

Selected bibliography

Nielsen, Michael A.; Chuang, Isaac L. (2000). Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (10th anniversary edition). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-63235-5. OCLC 43641333.