Nov. 2, 2024
QuantumX has welcomed three new faculty members from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering this year. QuantumX faculty are committed to pioneering the development of quantum-enabled technologies and advancing and integrating research, education and commercialization across the UW community and its partners.
“Welcoming these three outstanding faculty members to QuantumX is incredibly exciting,” said Kai-Mei Fu, QuantumX chair and Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor in Physics and electrical & computer engineering. “Mo Chen brings critical expertise in superconducting qubit technologies and a deep understanding of noise in real quantum systems. With the addition of Jerry Li and Chinmay Nirkhe, the UW is poised to determine the broad computation and information landscape that quantum technologies will impact.”
Mo Chen joined UW Materials Science & Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he has been a postdoctoral scholar in the Painter group focusing on the nanoscale engineering of materials to improve the performance of solid-state quantum devices. At UW, Chen plans to leverage experimental and theoretical tools to explore solid-state quantum platforms, including superconducting qubits, atomic-scale defects, and nanophononics. Through a co-design process, his lab aims to develop a profound understanding of device physics and materials science in solid-state quantum systems and innovate next-generation quantum devices for quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communication.
Jerry Li joined UW Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering from Microsoft, where he was a principal researcher at the PhysAGI (formerly Machine Learning Foundations) Group. Before joining Microsoft, Li was the VMware Research Fellow at the Simons Institute. Li’s research focuses on quantum information theory, the science of large foundation models, and high-dimensional statistics. His work explores methods to create robust algorithms that allow machine learning to defend against data poisoning and filter out statistical noise to perform statistical and practical tasks accurately. Li’s research has been recognized at NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.
Chinmay Nirkhe joined the UW Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering faculty from IBM Quantum as a research staff scientist. A member of the CS Theory and Quantum CS research groups, Nirkhe’s research interests lie at the intersection of complexity theory and quantum computation. His work has focused on proving hardness-of-approximation results and establishing lower bounds on the description complexity of quantum states, which has significant implications for quantum circuits and computing. His research has been featured in Quanta Magazine and presented as a plenary talk at the Quantum Information Processing (QIP)