Fred Chong Named Distinguished Service Professor in July 2026

Thirteen members of the University of Chicago faculty, including three from the Physical Sciences Division, have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships, effective July 1.

This year, Frederic Chong is among them and has been named the Seymour Goodman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College.

Chong’s research focuses on the design of software and hardware architectures for practical quantum computing. He was the lead principal investigator for the EPiQC Project (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing), a National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing from 2018-2024. Chong was a member of the National Quantum Advisory Committee from 2020-25, which advised the president on the National Quantum Initiative Program. In 2020, he co-founded Super.tech, a quantum software company, which was acquired by Infleqtion (formerly ColdQuanta) in 2022. In addition to his faculty position, Chong currently serves as chief scientist for quantum software at Infleqtion.

Prior to joining UChicago, Chong was a faculty member and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Davis, from 1997-2005. He was also a professor of computer science, director of computer engineering and director of the Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing at University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2005-2015.

He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, 17 best paper awards, and both UChicago’s Quantrell Undergraduate Teaching Award and its Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.

You can find the full list of Distinguished Professorships here.