William A. Coish

Bill Coish is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University. He was a CIFAR Junior Fellow in the Quantum Information Processing program from 2009 to 2011. During the first half of his Junior Fellowship, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of Program Director Raymond Laflamme at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), University of Waterloo. In September 2010, he took up his current position at McGill University. Bill previously held a postdoctoral appointment at IQC with Dr. Frank K. Wilhelm and Dr. Jonathan Baugh. Bill completed his Ph.D. in Physics in 2006 at the University of Basel, Switzerland, with Dr. Daniel Loss as his supervisor. He also holds a M.Sc. in Physics from McMaster University, and completed his B. Sc. in Physics at the University of Manitoba.

Dr. Coish is a theoretical physicist who investigates nanoscale systems – electronic devices with a size scale of a few billionths of a metre.  At these tiny length scales, the laws of quantum, rather than classical, mechanics hold sway.  Devices that obey quantum principles could drastically accelerate computational tasks and allow for highly secure private communication.  As a Junior Fellow, Dr. Coish is working on fundamental problems related to the physics of decoherence (the loss of information stored in quantum devices), the creation of entanglement (strong correlations between quantum particles, necessary to improve communication tasks), and coupling distant quantum systems with light, a prerequisite for large-scale computation with quantum devices.

More information about Dr. Coish's work can be found on his website:

Bill Coish at McGill