New faculty member looks for the quantum advantage

Theorist David Gosset returns to IQC

Former postdoctoral fellow David Gosset returns to the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) as an Associate Professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo.

Gosset received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2011 under the supervision of Edward Farhi.  His doctoral work focused on the power and limitations of quantum adiabatic algorithms. This piqued his interest in exploring a computer science perspective on physics and its application to models of computation, the computational complexity of quantum many-body systems, and quantum algorithms.

After postdoctoral fellowships at IQC and at Caltech, Gosset joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He was awarded the 2016 Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award for “Improved classical simulation of quantum circuits dominated by Clifford gates” with Sergey Bravyi.

Now back at IQC, Gosset’s theoretical research program could guide the way toward promising use cases for the next generation of quantum computers. He is investigating novel ways that quantum computers can achieve an advantage over classical computers, the limits of classical simulation methods, and the computational complexity of quantum many-body systems.