Dr. Colin P. Williams is Vice President of Strategy & Corporate Development at D-Wave Systems Inc., reporting directly to the CEO. He has spent over 20 years in quantum computing and has developed and patented algorithms and applications for both gate model and annealing model approaches. Prior to joining D-Wave, Colin was a Senior Research Scientist (SRS) and Program Manager for Advanced Computing Paradigms at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Earlier, as an acting Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, he devised, developed, and taught Stanford's first courses on quantum computing & quantum communications, and computer-based mathematics. Colin earned his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1989 and wrote “Explorations in Quantum Computing,” the first textbook in the field.