I am an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). My research group welcomes highly motivated students with a passion for quantum science.

Prior to UCLA, I was a DuBridge Postdoctoral Scholar at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech, hosted by John Preskill. I received my PhD in Physics from Harvard University under the guidance of Mikhail Lukin, after obtaining my BSc in Physics and Mathematics at MIT where I also worked with Edward Farhi.

My research interests are at the interface of physics, math, and computer science, touching on many topics in quantum information theory, mathematical optimization, computational complexity, and many-body physics. My contributions include analyzing quantum algorithms and architectures, as well as proving fundamental results in quantum complexity theory. I also work closely with experimentalists to develop practical schemes of quantum applications for current and near-term experimental implementations.

My Erdős number is 3.

---

News:

• Dec 13, 2024. Excited to share our new paper on arXiv, "A Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm for Local Hamiltonian Problems", with my brilliant mentees Ishaan Kannan and Robbie King!
• Dec 6, 2024. Our paper "Quantum speedups in solving near-symmetric optimization problems by low-depth QAOA" has been accepted to QIP 2025!
• Nov 14, 2024. I will be teaching a special topics class, Physics of Quantum Information and Computation (EC ENGR 279AS), for the winter 2025 quarter at UCLA.
• Sep 26, 2024. Our paper "Statistical Estimation in the Spiked Tensor Model via the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm" has been accepted to NeurIPS 2024 as a spotlight!