Jonathan Oppenheim is a professor of quantum theory in the Department of Physics and Astronomy (Quantum Information Group) at University College London (UCL). He currently holds a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award and an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship. He completed his Ph.D. under Bill Unruh at the University of British Columbia in 2001 and was a postdoc under Don Page at the University of Alberta and Jacob Bekenstein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2003, he moved to the University of Cambridge, where he held a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2012, he moved to UCL to take up his current position.
Oppenheim’s recent research focused on the field of quantum thermodynamics, which has very recently seen exciting progress inspired by ideas from quantum information theory. He also is active in the fields of quantum gravity, black hole thermodynamics, and the foundations of statistical mechanics. Although these fields are often distinct, there are many conceptual overlaps. His contributions include the discovery of new second laws of thermodynamics that become important at the quantum scale, and the discovery of negative information and quantum state merging. He is currently applying results from quantum information theory to understand black hole thermodynamics and quantum gravity. He is particularly interested in the black hole information paradox and holographic entanglement, and attempts to understand gravity from a thermodynamical perspective.