IQC welcomes William Slofstra as newest Research Assistant Professor

William Slofstra returns to the University of Waterloo campus where he completed his BMath in the Departments of Pure Mathematics and Combinatorics & Optimization.

After completing his undergraduate studies at Waterloo, Slofstra continued to the University of California, Berkeley for his PhD in Mathematics. Before taking on a position as the Kreneger Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis where he has spent the last three years, he spent six months as a Research Associate at the University of British Columbia.

His research has focused on algebra, specifically in Lie theory/ representation theory, Schubert calculus and connected areas. In quantum information, Slofstra’s work has focused on non-local games; an active and important area of research in quantum computation. Non-local games give an example of a distributed computational task where entanglement can improve performance. This has applications in other tasks in quantum information including entanglement verification and quantum key distribution.

His research aims to:

• Apply Lie theory/representation theory, Schubert calculus and connected areas to quantum information.
• Identify new classes of tractable non-local games that might be especially suitable for practical applications.

While an undergraduate at Waterloo, Slofstra started working in quantum information science with Richard Cleve; this resulted in a publication on Quantum XOR Proof systems.