Francesco Petruccione has a PhD in Physics from the University of Freiburg i. Br. (Germany). In 2004 he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In 2007 he was granted the South African Research Chair for Quantum Information Processing and Communication. At present, he is the interim Director of the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, and Professor of Quantum Computing in the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking of the Stellenbosch University. He is an elected member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa, a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and of the African Academy of Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.