Francesco Petruccione was born in 1961 in Genova (Italy). He studied Physics at the University of Freiburg i. Br. and received his PhD in 1988. He was conferred the “Habilitation” degree (Dr. rer. nat. habil.) from the same University in 1994. In 2004 he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), in Durban (South Africa). In 2005 he was awarded an Innovation Fund grant to set up a Centre for Quantum Technology. In 2007 he was granted the South African Research Chair for Quantum Information Processing and Communication. At present, he is also Pro Vice-Chancellor Big Data and Informatics of UKZN, one of the Deputy Directors of the National Institute for Theoretical Physics (NITheP) and Adjunct Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering of the Korean Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST). Prof Petruccione is an elected member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa, a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and a Fellow of the University of KwaZulu- Natal. He has published about 190 papers in refereed scientific journals. He is the co- author of a monograph on “The Theory of Open Quantum Systems ” (more than 7000 citations according to Google Scholar), that was published in 2002, reprinted as a paperback in 2007, and translated in Russian. Recently, he published a monograph (with Maria Schuld) on “Supervised Learning with Quantum Computers”. He is the editor of several proceedings volumes and of special editions of scientific journals. Prof Petruccione is a member of the Editorial Board of the journals “Open Systems and Information Dynamics”, “Scientific Reports”, and “Quantum Machine Intelligence”.