Where is the top QC research being done in academia?
It depends what you mean. Are you interested in experiment or theory? Also, does it strictly have to be computing, or are you interested in the broader framework of quantum information theory? Assuming the latter, here are some more theoretical groups:
CANADA
Waterloo (University and Perimeter Institute)
Calgary (Cleve group)
Montreal (Groups of Brassard and Crepeau)
USA
Caltech (Preskill group)
IBM (Yorktown - Bennett group)
Berkley (Vazirani group)
Los Alamos
New Mexico (Caves and Deutsch groups)
MIT (Lloyd, Chuang, Shor groups)
Australia
Brisbane (Nielsen group)
UK
Cambridge (Ekert group)
Bristol (Jozsa, Popescu, Linden, Winter, Rarity)
Oxford (Much smaller group now, but was one of the leading groups in the early days)
Rest of Europe
Gdansk (Horodecki group)
Vienna (Zeilinger group)
Munich (Max Planck institute - Cirac group)
Amsterdam (CWI - Burhman group)
Braunsweig (Werner group)
This is only a partial list, concentrating on large or "famous" groups, focussed on theory rather than experiment. Some of the leading lights of the field are rather isolated in colleges where only one or two people work on the subject (Schumacher and Wooters for example). Finally, the field is growing at a rapid rate, so it is probably easier to ask which universities are not studying quantum computing rather than the other way around.
