Jacob Beckey recently completed his PhD at the University of Colorado where he was part of the group of Graeme Smith at the University of Colorado and JILA, a joint quantum institute between the University of Colorado and NIST Boulder. During his PhD he completed internships at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

At Illinois, Beckey will work with Assistant Professor of Mathematics Felix Leditzky on projects related to quantum sensing, quantum entanglement theory and quantum learning theory. In particular, he is eager to resolve open problems related to learning quantum channels and learning quantum states. This means figuring out a way to determine their properties when the exact channel or state one is dealing with is unknown.

“I was motivated to apply to the IQUIST fellowship program because of the large number of talented researchers affiliated with IQUIST,” says Beckey. “I am particularly excited to join the center because I believe it will enable me to collaborate more easily with experimental groups at UIUC.”

The collaborative nature of IQUIST is similar to Beckey’s previous home at JILA, where he helped start the Idealized Science Institute, an educational non-profit helping teachers and students engage in authentic scientific practices. Beckey hopes to bring this experience to his future career as part of IQUIST.

“I am very passionate about teaching and outreach and hope to engage in science communication and outreach through IQUIST,” says Beckey. “After my postdoc, I hope to obtain a professorship and continue to expand the non-profit while teaching and conducting research in a university setting.”

Bowen Shi obtained his doctoral degree from The Ohio State University in 2020, working under Yuan-Ming Lu on the understanding the emergence of anyons, quasiparticles that are found in two-dimensional systems, from a quantum information perspective.

He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Diego under John McGreevy as part of the Simons Collaboration on Ultra-Quantum Matter. There, he was able to continue work he had started during his doctoral studies on a theoretical framework knows as the entanglement bootstrap. He continued work in this area through the summer of 2024 during a short-term postdoctoral study at UC Davis working with Isaac Kim.

At Illinois, Shi will be working with a new faculty member, Assistant Professor of Physics Jong Yeon Lee. Lee’s interest in the theoretical aspects of quantum many-body systems and quantum phases of matter aligns closely with Shi’s previous work.

“I expect a lot of interaction with people in IQUIST, as well as the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory,” says Shi, before pointing out several individuals, including IQUIST members Bryan Clark and Thomas Faulkner, with whom he shares interests.

“My main research interest it to develop a theoretical framework to understand the universal properties of many-body systems,” says Shi. “Quantum information tools are important to my work and working in a research institute where both quantum information and condensed matter physics are emphasized is amazing. I hope that some of the questions we ask as part of our research will help make another bridge between the two fields.”

Mehrdad Tahmasbi joins IQUIST from the Tufts University where he was a postdoc. Before that, he completed a postdoc in the QuSoft quantum software research center at the University of Amsterdam, after completing a PhD at Georgia Institute of Technology under the supervision of Matthieu Bloch.

As an IQUIST Fellow, Tahmasbi will be working under the join supervision of Associate Professor Dakshita Khurana and Assistant Professor Makrand Sinha, both of the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. In addition, Tahmasbi is a Siebel School Future Faculty Fellow.

“My primary goal is to understand the role of quantum mechanics in information processing, particularly in the context of computing,” says Tahmasbi. “While there is strong evidence suggesting that quantum computers can solve problems, such as factoring, much faster than classical computers, there are no rigorous proofs to support this. I aim to work on simplified computational models where it is possible to prove a clear separation between classical and quantum computing.”

Tahmasbi was motivated to become an IQUIST Fellow by the ability to collaborate within a strong community of quantum researchers from different fields, including both theorists and experimentalists. In the future, he hopes to pursue an academic position in quantum information science.

Yijing Huang completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University and is has joined Professor Fahad Mahmood's lab and is considering a career in academics. Her experience with the scholar program has only made her interest in continuing research stronger. 

Zhubing Jia completed her Ph.D. in physics at Duke University. She has completed several years of research in trapped-ion quantum computing and joined Professor Jacob Covey’s lab to focus on utilizing neutral ytterbium-171 atom tweezer arrays for quantum information processing.

Zhanzhi Jiang is a postdoctoral scholar from the University of Texas – Austin. He studied in the Nanoscale Electromagnetic Lab led by Professor Keji Lai. At UIUC, he is part of the Condensed Matter and Quantum Information Science group led by Professor Angela Kou.