Currently a Rhodes Scholar, Patrick is completing his doctorate at Oxford University's Centre for Quantum Computation. Although he was unaware of it at the time, his current research interests were foreshadowed at an early age; as a high-school student, he worked summers writing networking software and graphics code for an operating systems company with the oddly prescient name Quantum Software Systems. He went on to do an undergraduate degree at McGill University with joint honours in physics and mathematics, spending the summer of his freshman year as a research intern at the Santa Fe Institute, working on phase transitions in probabilistic cellular automata. Ignoring all these signs that his fate was to lecture on quantum computation at an SFI summer school, he flirted with the mathematics of quantum field theory before coming to his senses and committing to the physics of information. In September Patrick will take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology.