John Martinis

Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

I'm quite excited about this talk and, you know, love to explain to people about, you know, what this prize is all about.

Well, so I grew up in San Pedro, California and, you know, grew up there my whole time.

My father is a fireman and my mom stayed at home, took care of us.

And, you know, through the years, I was always interested in science, technology.

I'm going to say one of the things is, you know, my dad, you know,

Actually didn't have a high school education, but very smart person.

He was always building things in the garage, various projects.

So I grew up kind of knowing how to build things, which also kind of tells you how things work.

You know, kind of empirical view, you know, tactical view of how physics works.

So when I took physics in high school, I actually loved it because there was actually some math behind it and concepts and, you know, really made sense to me.

And, you know, I just really, you know, fell in love with the subject and then went to UC Berkeley and did pretty well there and enjoyed it, enjoyed it a lot.

And then in my senior year at UC Berkeley, I had a class from John Clark, who was my advisor.

And found out what he was doing.

He was just starting to look at these quantum mechanics and electrical devices stuff.

And it sounded really interesting for me.

I guess I have, you know, I guess I could see maybe when something maybe would take off.

So I started to do the graduate school work with him.

I went to Gertrude for graduate school, which you're not supposed to do.

Yeah, I stayed at Berkeley, went to grad school.