- Email: lschaeffer@uwaterloo.ca
- Office: QNC 3126
- Website: Luke Schaeffer’s website
- Admin Support: Chin Lee
The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) is excited to welcome back Luke Schaeffer as Assistant Professor this September, with the Cheriton School of Computer Science as his home department.
He joins us from the Joint Center for Quantum Information Science at the University of Maryland where he was a Hartree Postdoctoral Fellow. Luke’s background is in discrete math, and he has worked on combinatorial game theory, combinatorics on words (the subject of his Master's) and cellular automata. He obtained his PhD from MIT under the supervision by Scott Aaronson (2019) and then spent three years at IQC as a postdoctoral fellow (2019-2022).
As a theorist, his research is focused on quantum complexity theory, specifically Clifford circuits, low-depth circuits (classical and quantum) and classical simulation of quantum circuits. He has also been exploring quantum chemistry and is looking forward to proving ways quantum computers can do things better than classical ones.
Degrees
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PhD, Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2019)
- MMath, Computer Science, University of Waterloo (2013)
- BMath, Computational Math, University of Waterloo (2011)
Research interests
My focus is on quantum complexity theory with recurring themes of
- Clifford circuits
- Low-depth circuits (classical and quantum), and
- Classical simulation of quantum circuits
Publications
Teaching
I served as a teaching assistant for the following courses.
- Design and Analysis of Algorithms (MIT, Fall 2018)
- Geometric Computation (MIT, Spring 2018)
- Advanced Algorithms (MIT, Fall 2017)
- Introduction to the Theory of Computation (Waterloo)
- Algorithms (Waterloo)