Marco Pistoia, Ph.D.

Marco Pistoia, Ph.D. is Managing Director, Distinguished Engineer, and Head of Global Technology Applied Research at JPMorgan Chase, where he leads research in various areas, particularly Quantum Computing.  He joined JPMorgan Chase in January 2020.  In January 2021, he was one of 21 new JPMorgan Chase Prolific Inventors in the class of 2021 and one of just 56 current JPMorgan Chase employees to reach this significant career milestone.  In May 2021, he was nominated one of JPMorgan Chase's fortyfive Distinguished Engineers, the highest technical title in the firm.

Formerly, he was a Senior Manager, Distinguished Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he managed an international team of researchers responsible for Quantum Computing Algorithms and Applications.  Dr. Pistoia was at IBM Research for 24 years.

In August 2022, Dr. Pistoia was certified as the 250th most prolific inventor of all time according to the US Patents and Trademarks Office.  He is the inventor of 271 patents, granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and 319 patent-pending applications.  19 of his granted patents and 36 of his patent applications are in the areas of Quantum Computing of Quantum Communications.  Most of his intellectual property is in the areas of static program analysis, formal verification and language-based security.  U.S. patent 8,635,602, Verification of Information-flow Downgraders, of which Dr. Pistoia is a coinventor, was featured in the news as one of the top-ten patents among the 7,534 patents granted to IBM in the year 2014.

In March 2023, Dr. Pistoia was one of the 12 technologists included in the HPCwire People to Watch 2023, a 21-year-old program that "recognizes HPC professionals who play leading roles in driving innovation within their particular fields, making significant contributions to society as a whole. Over the course of the program, HPCwire has recognized nearly 200 HPC luminaries who have gone on to achieve extraordinary things."  In May 2023, Dr. Pistoia received the Instinet Positive Change: Visionary Markets Choice Award.

Dr. Pistoia received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from New York University in May 2005.  His mathematical interests include linear algebra, invariant theory, and quantum information theory. He has written over 400 scholarly articles on various aspects of Program Analysis, Language-Based Security, and Quantum Computing.  He is the lead author of nine printed books, including Enterprise Java Security (published by Addison-Wesley in English and by Tsinghua University Press in Chinese) and Java 2 Network Security (published by Prentice Hall), both used as textbooks in many universities worldwide.  He is also a coauthor of the online book Learn Quantum Computation using Qiskit.  Marco’s code (with his name officially credited) is still part of the Java SDK documentation since 1999, which means that it has been installed on tens of millions of computers worldwide.

In the course of his career, Dr. Pistoia has designed and implemented several components and contributed large amounts of code to IBM’s two main products for static quality analysis: IBM Rational Software Analyzer and IBM Security AppScan Source.  He has also contributed code and technology to the main IBM products in mobile computing: IBM Fiberlink MaaS360, IBM MobileFirst Platform Development Foundation, IBM Tealeaf CX Mobile, and IBM Rational Test Workbench.  Most recently, he has designed, led the development of, and contributed code and technology to the library of quantum algorithms and applications (Finance, Artificial Intelligence, Optimization, and Chemistry) included in Qiskit, IBM’s Quantum Computing software stack.

He has published and presented at numerous scientific conferences worldwide, including NeurIPS, OOPSLA, ECOOP, PLDI, ICSE, ACSAC, ISSTA, CCS, VMCAI, ICST, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE, also known as IEEE Quantum Week). He has published articles in numerous journals, including Nature Reviews Physics, Nature Communications Physics, Nature Scientific Reports, Nature Partner Journal (npj) on Quantum Information, Physical Review Research, Journal of Chemical Theory of Computation, Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Physical Chemistry, Quantum Science and Technology Institute of Physics, Physical Review A, Bulletin of the American Physical Society, IEEE Computer, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodologies, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering, and Quantum – the Open Journal for Quantum Science.  He has also been invited to lecture at several research institutions worldwide, including Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, University of Chicago, University of Maryland, Purdue University, Rutgers University, Virginia Tech, Stony Brook University, University of Texas at Austin, Dartmouth College, University of Notre Dame, Fordham University, Stevens Institute of Technology, Chicago Quantum Exchange, Iona University, Ohio State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, Tohoku University, Keio University, and the National Institute of Informatics in Japan, École Normale Supérieure in France, Dagstuhl School of Informatics and Saarland University in Germany, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich in Switzerland, The Royal Society and University College London in the United Kingdom, La Sapienza University, Polytecnic University of Milan and Tor Vergata University in Italy, Tel Aviv University, Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) and Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, University of Porto in Portugal, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, University of Melbourne in Australia, and Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU) in Denmark.  For several years he was an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at New York University and at Fordham University in New York.

He was the General and Program Co-chair of PLAS 2008 and the IEEE Workshop on Quantum Algorithms for Financial Applications 2022, the Program Chair of the ACM Student Research Competition at PLDI 2009, the Program Co-Chair of the Industrial Tracks of ICST 2020 and MobileSoft 2016 and 2017.  Furthermore, he has served as a Program Committee member on several conferences, including ICST 2023, ASPLOS 2021, QCE 2021 and 2022, PLDI 2016 and 2017, CCS 2017, ICSE 2012, 2017 and 2019. ICST 2012, ISSTA 2011, PLAS 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015, NDSS 2009, IEEE SSIRI 2009, 2010 and 2011, IEEE SERE 2012, ACSAC 2008 and 2009, and CISIM 2012.  Dr. Pistoia has been a member of the Industry Advisory Council for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Quantum Science Center based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory since April 2020.

Dr. Pistoia has been the recipient of several awards, including five Best Paper Awards (three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at the ACM ISSTA 2007, 2011 and 2014 conferences, respectively, a Best Paper Award at the ACM IUI 2017 conference, and an Honorable Mention at the IEEE VL/HCC 2017 Symposium).

In April 2019, Dr. Pistoia received two IBM Corporate Awards – a Corporate Award is the highest technical recognition inside IBM.  He is the only IBM employee worldwide, on a population of over 350,000 employees, to have received two Corporate Awards in the same year.  He has also received an IBM Research Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award (3 papers selected our of 130), four IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, and four IBM Research Division Awards.  When he was a college student, he received a European Community Erasmus Fellowship Award.

In September 2007, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, the National Committee of the Italian Presidents of Faculties of Sciences and Technologies, and Confindustria, Italy's leading organization representing all the Italian manufacturing and service companies, presented Pistoia as one of the 70 most successful Italian mathematicians who graduated from an Italian university between the years 1980 and 2000.  His biography was published in the book Matematici al Lavoro.

Dr. Pistoia has dual citizenship: American and Italian.  On a personal level, Marco is the father of two beautiful children, Juliet, 14, and Charles, 12.  He is also a passionate body builder and basketball player.