Anna Sanpera

Anna Sanpera, born in Manresa in 1962, holds a bachelor’s and a PhD in Physics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she was a member of the Quantum Optics group. 

In 1993, she became a contracted researcher and Fleming Fellow at Oxford University (UK), where she entered the then-emerging field of quantum information. From 1996 to 1998, she held a European Community research fellowship at the University of Paris-Saclay (France) and in 1998 became a researcher at Leibniz University in Hanover (Germany), where she qualified as a professor in 2000.  

Since 2005, she has been an ICREA Research Professor in the Quantum Information Group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she leads a research group focuses on quantum information, ultracold quantum gases, many-body quantum systems and, more recently, quantum learning techniques. She is actively involved in science education and public outreach. 

In 2024, she partnered with other European women scientists to publish the manifesto ‘Women for Quantum’ with the aim of sparking a public debate on the values that should underpin scientific and quantum technological research in these turbulent times.  

Beyond her scientific work, she is a passionate reader and music and sports enthusiast, and she especially enjoys listening to what children have to say.