University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing continues rapid growth

The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) has added renowned physicist Raffi Budakian, Michal Bajcsy and Kyung Choi to grow its faculty complement to 21.

IQC, which was recently allotted an additional $15 million funding by the Government of Canada, continues to grow towards its target of 33 faculty, 55 postdoctoral fellows and 165 graduate students.

“Over the last 11 years, IQC has grown from just two faculty members to 21 today,” said Raymond Laflamme, executive director of IQC. “The breadth of experience and research excellence happening in Waterloo is increased yet again with the addition of these talented researchers. Waterloo Region is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the full spectrum of opportunity in quantum technologies.”

Raffi Budakian takes on the Nanotechnology (WIN) Endowed Chair in Superconductivity in Waterloo’s Physics and Astronomy department and IQC from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Budakian won a World Technology Award in 2005 for his work in the detection and manipulation of quantum spins. Spin is a magnetic property of elementary particles and is a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon. The use of spins for quantum information processing is one of the promising approaches being applied by IQC researchers.

Budakian earned his bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to joining Illinois, Budakian spent three years as a visiting scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He will join IQC in July 2014.

Michal Bajcsy and Kyung Choi joined Waterloo in January 2014. Bajcsy recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Ginzton Laboratory at Stanford University. He completed his PhD at Harvard University and spent several years as a visiting student at MIT. He is appointed to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research focuses on scalable photonic devices and quantum optics experimental platforms based on quantum emitters coupled to nanophotonic structures.

Kyung Choi has been a Senior Scientist and Group Leader at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology since 2011. Choi completed his PhD and a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. His research will focus on the development and application of advanced techniques in cold atom physics and quantum optics to probe the fundamental nature of the quantum world. He is appointed to the Department of Physics and Astronomy in January 2014.