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Staff Profile

Dr Jonte Hance

Head of the Quantum Group, EPSRC Quantum Technologies Career Acceleration Fellow, and Lecturer in Applied Quantum Foundations

Background

I'm currently Head of the Quantum Group, and a Lecturer in Applied Quantum Foundations, in the School of Computing at Newcastle University. I was previously Interim Head of the AMBER Group (2025). I'm also an Honorary Lecturer in the Dept of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Bristol. I have a PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and an MSci in Physics and Philosophy, both from the University of Bristol. After my PhD, I spent 11 months as a Phoenix Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Hiroshima University before starting at Newcastle.

I have published 27 articles so far, in high-impact journals (such as Nature Physics, npj Quantum Information, and Quantum Science and Technology). I have served as a peer reviewer over 90 times for various academic journals, and am part of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Talent Peer Review College, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Peer Review College, and Quantum Technologies Early Career Forum, as well as the British Council Peer Review College. I've also published three Opinion pieces (two in Physics World, one in Quantum Views), and contributed to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology's recent POSTnote on Quantum Computing, Sensing, and Communications, and Labour Tech's recent white paper on investment in quantum technologies. I am on the Editorial Board for the UK Institute of Physics (IOP)'s Journal of Physics Communications, and am a Guest Editor for the IOP's Journal of Physics: Photonics's Focus Issue on Photonics for Quantum Foundations, and a Theme Issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. I am co-Chair for the IOP's upcoming flagship conference, Photon 2026, and am on the Conference Organising Committee for the IOP's QuAMP 2025. I am on the Executive Committee for the American Physical Society's Forum for Diversity and Inclusion (FDI), and on the Group Committees for the IOP's Quantum Optics, Quantum Information, and Quantum Control (QQQ) Group, Mathematical and Theoretical Physics Group, and North East Branch.

I currently hold an EPSRC Quantum Technologies Career Acceleration Fellowship (worth £1.7 million fEC, plus £275k in-kind contributions from Project Partners), funding 50% of my time plus two PDRAs (Nicolas Underwood and Peter TJ Bradshaw) from 2025-2030. I will be using this to begin building my own lab, the Applied Quantum Foundations Lab, within the Quantum Group in the School of Computing. I have also recently joined the £12.8 million fEC EPSRC National Edge AI Hub as a Co-Investigator, to lead the new Quantum Machine Learning Research Theme. I am Co-Investigator on the £1.3 million fEC UKRI Cross Research Council Responsive Mode Grant Quantum Emotions: Using the Quantum Formalism to explain temporal order effects in memory for emotional events (2026-28), and the £111k fEC EPSRC Mathematical Science Small Grant Using Quantum Weirdness to Solve (NP-)Hard Problems (2026).

I was just named one of the Quantum 100 for the United Nations' International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

Research

I research at the intersection of quantum foundations and quantum technologies: using quantum foundations to uncover new phenomena that can be used to develop new quantum technologies, and using quantum technologies to experimentally test models proposed in quantum foundations.

Most quantum technologies were originally based on quantum foundational work. For instance, quantum key distribution was developed from the uncertainty principle and no-cloning theorem, quantum computation (by Deutsch’s own account) was developed from quantum parallelism and interference, and quantum metrology was developed from consideration of quantum measurement and back action, and the leveraging of entanglement and squeezing.

My work contributes to the underpinning science of quantum technologies, showing how quantum foundational ideas can be adapted into quantum technological applications. It also shows quantum technologies can benefit quantum foundations – how these technologies can be utilised to test foundational hypotheses and demonstrate foundational principles. Therefore, this work demonstrates the interplay between quantum foundations and quantum technologies.

Worldwide, there is currently a race to develop useful quantum technologies. The fact that all quantum technologies were initially based on theoretical quantum foundational work illustrates how critically important quantum foundational research is, and why foundational work is necessary if we want to develop truly new quantum technologies (rather than just making short-term minor enhancements to current technologies).

Teaching

Here at Newcastle University, I teach on the BSc Computer Science's Stage 2 (second-year) module CSC2034: Introducing Contemporary Topics in Computing, for which I run the Quantum Computing topic, plus teach academic skills (how to research, how to do academic writing, how to read an academic paper, etc). I am also the Module Leader for CSC3132: Introduction to Quantum Computing, and am developing a new module CSC:3133: Quantum Algorithms (starting 2026/27). I have just earnt full Fellowship of the UK's Advance-HE (FHEA).

I am currently supervising two PDRAs (Dr Peter TJ Bradshaw and Dr Nicolas Underwood, both funded through my EPSRC QTCA Fellowship) and one PhD candidate (Viktorija Bezganovic). I have previously supervised 3 MSc Advanced Computer Science project students, 2 MSc Computer Science project students, 3 BSc Computer Science final-year project students, 3 summer research interns (funded through my Royal Society Research Grant), and one PhD student, James Byrne, for his three-month first-year project at the University of Bristol's Centre for Doctoral Training in Quantum Engineering. I have also co-supervised 7 final-year BSc Psychology students cross-faculty for their Empirical Project (PSY3097) with my collaborator Dr Barbara-Anne Robertson. I was one of the American Physical Society's 2023/24 cohort of Career Mentoring Fellows, and continue mentoring undergraduate and high-school students through the APS.

At the University of Bristol, I served as a Graduate Teacher Level 1 and 2 (Teaching Assistant) for over 400 hours on 8 separate units across the School of Physics, Department of Engineering Mathematics and Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. This included significant solo teaching in mathematics for physicists and engineers, and in quantum mechanics and quantum information. While doing this, I passed the PGCert Academic Practice unit AFACM0019: Engaging Higher Education Students in their Learning (University of Bristol, 30 credits), earning Associate Fellowship of the UK's Advance-HE.

Publications