Sebastian Deffner

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Sebastian Deffner is a German theoretical physicist and professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He works in quantum thermodynamics, focusing on the thermodynamics of quantum information, quantum speed limits for open systems, quantum control, and shortcuts to adiabaticity. He was born in Augsburg, Germany, and earned his Diplom-Physiker (Master of Science) in 2008 and his PhD in 2011 from the University of Augsburg, supervised by Eric Lutz. He held research roles at Augsburg (2008–2011), then was a DAAD postdoctoral fellow and Research Associate at the University of Maryland, College Park (2011–2014) with Christopher Jarzynski. From 2014–2016 he was a Director’s Funded Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory with Wojciech H. Zurek. Since 2016 he has been a faculty member at UMBC, leading the quantum thermodynamics group, and a visiting professor at the University of Campinas in Brazil. He has received the 2016 Early Career Award from New Journal of Physics and the 2016 Leon Heller Postdoctoral Publication Prize at LANL. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Physics Communications (since 2017), Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics (since 2019), and the Quantum Information section board of Entropy; he is on the inaugural editorial board of PRX Quantum. In 2020 he married Catherine Nakalembe, a remote sensing scientist, and they have two children.