Andrew Dzurak, The Engineer Turning Ordinary Transistors Into Qubits

The Sydney physicist who with Andrea Morello built the first qubit made from a single atom in silicon, argued that a quantum computer should be made from the same transistor the chip industry already prints by the billion, and founded a company to prove it. Andrew Dzurak is the Australian physicist and engineer who with Andrea Morello built the first qubit made from a single atom in silicon and then founded Diraq, the Sydney company that makes silicon spin qubits on ordinary chip-industry production lines. He is Scientia Professor in Quantum Engineering at UNSW Sydney, and he held an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship from 2019 until it closed in May 2025. He was final author on the 2010 paper that first read out a single electron spin in silicon, and on the 2015 paper that reported the first two-qubit logic gate in the material. For most of the last fifteen years his argument has been the same one. The transistor is the most manufactured object in human history, and it is the right thing to build a quantum computer out of. The appeal of the argument is easy to state. Delivering it is not. If the qubit is a…