Francesco Petruccione studied Physics at the University of Freiburg i. Br. and received his PhD in 1988 and the “Habilitation” degree (Dr. rer. nat. habil.) in 1994. In 2004 he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), in Durban (South Africa). In 2007 he was granted the South African Research Chair for Quantum Information Processing and Communication. At present, he is the interim Director of the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, Pro Vice-Chancellor Big Data and Informatics of UKZN, and Professor Extraordinary at the Department of Physics of the Stellenbosch University..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 250 papers in refereed scientific journals. He is the co-author of a monograph on “The Theory of Open Quantum Systems " (more than 9000 citations according to Google Scholar), that was published in 2002, reprinted as paperback in 2007, and translated in Russian. In 2018 he published a monograph (with Maria Schuld) on "Supervised Learning with Quantum Computers” that was already translated into Japanese. The second extended edition was published in 2021 under the title “Machine 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", "Quantum Machine Intelligence”.