Patrick Dreher

Biography

Dr. Patrick Dreher is currently an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering  at NC State University.

In 2018 NC State became the first university in North America to establish an IBM Quantum Hub as part of the global IBM Quantum Network.  This Network is a collaboration between IBM and top Fortune 500 companies, national research labs and leading universities to advance quantum computing.  In January  2019, the University appointed him as the Chief Scientist for the NC State IBM Quantum Hub tasked with advancing NC State’s quantum computing research and education initiatives.   Dr. Dreher retired and stepped down as Research Professor and Chief Scientist for the NC State IBM Quantum Initiative in August 2023.

He received his B.S. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an M.S. in physics from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana. He also earned an M.B.A. from Rensselaer with a concentration in R&D management.

Dr. Dreher has over 25 years of research experience in the application of computing technologies to science and engineering research problems.  His work in cloud computing has included the development of early techniques for embedding cloud systems within supercomputers to fully exploit their HPC hardware capabilities.  His current research interests are focused on error mitigation and error suppression in quantum computing systems and the application of quantum computing to problems in high energy, nuclear and many-body condensed matter physics problems.

Dr. Dreher has also held significant R&D management positions in academia at MIT and NC State, in the Department of Energy (DoE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and in industry supporting the Department of Defense (DoD) high-performance computing programs in science and engineering.  He has served on numerous peer review panels for the Department of Energy, the DoD HPC Modernization Program and the National Science Foundation including the NSF Taskforce Advisory Committee on Campus Cyberinfrastructure.

Education

• Ph.D. 1991
  Physics
  University of Illinois-Urbana
• Master's 1980
  Physics
  University of Chicago
• Master's 1977
  Business Administration
  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Bachelor's 1975
  Physics, Minor in Mathematics
  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Recent Publications

• Measuring qubit stability in a gate-based NISQ hardware processor (2023)
• Indexed improvements for real-time trotter evolution of a (1 (2021)
• Real-time quantum calculations of phase shifts using wave packet time delays (2021)
• Programming Quantum Computers: A Primer with IBM Q and D-Wave Exercises (2019)
• Cost Analysis Comparing HPC Public Versus Private Cloud Computing (2017)
• Embedding Cloud Computing inside Supercomputer Architectures (2016)
• PageRank pipeline benchmark: Proposal for a holistic system benchmark for big-data platforms (2016)
• Toward implementation of a software defined cloud on a supercomputer (2014)