Chris Monroe is an atomic physicist and quantum information scientist who demonstrated the first quantum gate realized in any system at NIST in the 1990s. At the University of Michigan and University of Maryland, he discovered new ways to scale trapped ion qubits and simplify their control with semiconductor chip traps, simplified lasers, and photonic interfaces for long-distance entanglement. He received the American Physical Society I. I. Rabi Prize and the Arthur Schawlow Laser Science Prize and has been elected into the National Academy of Sciences. He is Co-founder and Chief Scientist at IonQ and is a leading advocate of the National Quantum Initiative. He has an SB in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in Physics from the University of Colorado Boulder.