Prof Bob Coecke is Founder and CEO of Relational Intelligence. Before that he was Chief Scientist of Quantinuum, 2020-2025, and Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Department of Computer Science of Oxford University, 2001-2020, where he built and led the 50 member Quantum Group. He has supervised 100 PhD students and managed some 300 researchers. He is also Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, and Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He was the first person to have Quantum Foundations as his professorial title.

He pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics (now in AMS's MSC2020 mathematics subject classification), Quantum Picturalism, ZX-calculus, DisCoCat, Quantum Natural Language Processing and Quantum Music. He co-authored Picturing Quantum Processes, a book providing a fully diagrammatic treatment of quantum theory and its applications. He co-authored Quantum in Pictures, which does the same, but now accessible to people with no maths background. Using the latter, he showed that everyone can understand quantum, as reported in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/16/physicist-bob-coecke-its-easier-to-convince-kids-than-adults-about-quantum-mechanics

He received the 2024 IEEE-LiCS test-of-time award. He founded the Quantum Physics and Logic and Applied Category Theory communities. His Royal Institution talk on quantum picturalism was the 5th most watched science talk of 2025. ​

He also has been called a pioneer of Industrial Music, he produced the 1st piece of music with a quantum computer, and invented the Quantum Guitar. He performed the first ever Quantum Symphony, called "Quantum Universe".