Seth Lloyd received a Ph.D. in Physics from Rockefeller University, under the supervision of Heinz Pagels.

He was a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Murray Gell-Mann on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. Since 1988, Lloyd has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. br> Lloyd is a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction.

Lloyd is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.