Philip Stamp is the director of the Pacific Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and a professor in the dept of Physics and Astronomy at UBC. He is also a long-term Visiting Associate in Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech. Prior to UBC he was joint director of the Spinoza institute in Utrecht (with G. ‘t Hooft), and Professor in the University of Utrecht. He was educated at the Universities of Sussex and Lancaster in the UK, and did postdocs in Massachusetts, Grenoble, and Santa Barbara.
For most of his career Prof. Stamp has worked in condensed matter theory, but more recently he has also been working on topics in quantum gravity. He has worked on quantum magnetism, superfluids and superconductors, and on the theory of decoherence and quantum relaxation. This latter work led to the “spin bath” model of quantum environments, widely used in quantum magnetism and quantum computing theory. The world’s first quantum computing company (“d-wave systems”), specializing in adiabatic quantum computation with superconducting qubits, was founded in Stamp’s research group in 1998. His work in quantum gravity has focused mostly on his “Correlated Worldline” theory, and predicted experimental consequences of it (notably the breakdown of quantum mechanics for massive bodies).
Philip Stamp is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and of the Royal Astronomical Society.