Luke Schaeffer

Dr. Luke Schaeffer is an Assistant Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, with a cross-affiliation at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC). Before joining UWaterloo, he was a Hartree Postdoctoral Fellow at the Joint Center for Quantum Information Science, University of Maryland. 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 of Scott Aaronson (2019) and then spent three years at IQC as a postdoctoral fellow (2011-2013).

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.