Patrick Hayden is a physicist and computer scientist active in the fields of quantum information theory and quantum computing. He is currently a professor in the Stanford University physics department and a distinguished research chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Prior to that he held a Canada Research Chair in the physics of information at McGill University. He received a B.Sc. (1998) from McGill University and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study for a D.Phil. (2001) at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Artur Ekert. In 2007 he was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science. He was a Canadian Mathematical Society Public Lecturer in 2008 and received a Simons Investigator Award in 2014.^[1]

Hayden has contributed substantially to quantum information theory. His contributions range from quantum information approaches to the theory of black holes^[2][3] to the study of quantum entanglement.^[4] Hayden and John Preskill considered information retrieval from evaporating black holes. Their study of a black hole's retention time for quantum information before it is revealed in the Hawking radiation; called the Hayden-Preskill thought experiment, turned out to be compatible with the black hole complementarity hypothesis.^[2]