Rate My Professor Yannick Meurice

Yannick Meurice is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Iowa. He earned his Licence en Physique (equivalent to B.S.) in 1981 and his Doctorat en Physique (Ph.D.) in 1985 from Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, under the supervision of Jacques Weyers. His early career featured a postdoctoral position at CERN in Geneva from 1984 to 1986, followed by a postdoctoral research associate role at Argonne National Laboratory from 1986 to 1988. He then served as Visiting Professor at Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados in Mexico City from 1988 to 1990. In 1990, Meurice joined The University of Iowa as Assistant Professor in Physics and Astronomy, advancing to Associate Professor in 1995 and full Professor in 2003, a position he holds today.

Meurice's research specializations encompass theoretical elementary particle physics, lattice gauge theory, and quantum simulations and computations. His contributions include lattice QCD calculations for B-meson decays, such as 'B_s → K l ν decay from lattice QCD' (Phys. Rev. D 100, 034501, 2019, with Bazavov et al.), and quantum simulation methods, exemplified by 'Quantum simulation of scattering in the quantum Ising model' (Phys. Rev. D 99, 094503, 2019, with Gustafson and Unmuth-Yockey) and 'Quantum simulation of the universal features of the Polyakov loop' (Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 223201, 2018, with Zhang et al.). He authored the book 'Quantum field theory: a quantum computation approach' (Institute of Physics Publishing, March 2021). Meurice's work has earned over 5,000 citations on Google Scholar and significant funding, including $2.3 million in federal grants in 2020 for quantum computing in high-energy physics. Awards include the University of Iowa Faculty Scholar (2003-2006) and Fellowship in the Institute of Physics (2004). He teaches interdisciplinary first-year seminars blending art and Physics, using the Ising model for digital aquatint and image texturing.