A tribute to Dr Sean Barrett

Sean Barrett, from the Department of Physics, was tragically killed in a car accident in Perth, Australia on Friday 19 October. Sean was an outstanding physicist, whose research was furthering Science's understanding of Quantum Physics and Quantum Computing, and his loss will be greatly felt by the academic community. Here, Professor Myungshik Kim and Terry Rudolph pay tribute to their friend and colleague. "Sean did his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Cambridge University. His doctoral work was on quantum information processing in a condensed matter system, a topic he was among the first to study. His pioneering PhD work was recognised by him moving to a prominent junior position at HP Labs in Bristol where he had full freedom to further develop his interest in implementations of quantum information processing. After a brief spell at Imperial College London as a postdoc, then Macquarie University, Sydney, as faculty, he came back to England to hold a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Imperial College London.