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Appalachian Quantum Initiative: Team Members


George Siopsis
George Siopsis

George Siopsis is a theoretical particle physicist currently working on quantum computing and quantum information processing. Together with collaborators at ORNL, he has built a quantum optics laboratory for quantum cryptography. He has developed quantum algorithms (quantum machine learning, quantum field theory, quantum walks, quantum games, etc.) and implemented them on existing quantum hardware (IBM, IonQ, D-wave). His research is funded by DoE/ORNL, ONR, DHS/CIRI, ARO, and DARPA.


Gong Gu
Gong Gu

Gong Gu is a Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of EECS. He joined the UTK faculty in 2010 from Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton, NJ, where he had worked after getting his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1999. His current research activities and interest are in the growth and manipulation of two-dimensional (2D) and other new materials, investigation of their novel physics, and exploration of their applications in electronics. He wishes to explore the use of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms to solve optimization and search problems in physics and engineering, such as the survey of the energy landscape of a known compound to discover all metastable crystalline structures (polymorphs). Such computational discoveries will guide experimental synthesis, leading to new materials with novel properties.


Steve Johnston
Steve Johnston

Steve Johnston is an Associate Professor in the UT Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research interests lie in condensed matter physics with a focus on applying numerical methods to strongly correlated electrons, multi-orbital systems, and electron-boson interactions. He has a specific interest in studying high-temperature superconductivity in both the iron-pnictides and cuprates. He often works towards making direct contact with spectroscopies such as angle-resolved photoemission, scanning tunneling microscopy, optical conductivity, and resonant inelastic x-ray scattering, and collaborates closely with experimentalists in order to unravel the meaning of results obtained using these complicated techniques. He is a 2019 recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.


Jim Ostrowski
Jim Ostrowski

Jim Ostrowski is an Associate Professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering department at the University of Tennessee. Jim’s primary research focus has been on developing algorithmic tools and theory to solve difficult optimization problems. To date, the search for difficult problems has led to two different research areas, symmetry exploitation and application in power systems. His work "Orbital Branching," has become an industry standard in dealing with symmetry in integer programming, and has been implemented in almost all optimization solvers. Similarly, his work in power generator scheduling optimization is currently being used in practice. He is an associate editor for the INFORMS Journal on Computing. Jim was the recipient of the 2017 Department of Energy’s Early Career Award.


Zi-Ling (Ben) Xue
Zi-Ling (Ben) Xue

Zi-Ling (Ben) Xue received his B.S. degree in 1982, majoring in physical chemistry and Ph.D. in chemistry in 1989. After a postdoctoral work in 1990-1992, he started his faculty appointment at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1992. Professor Xue is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and American Chemical Society (ACS). Dr. Xue has studied molecular magnetism, including spectroscopic investigations of single-molecule magnets (SMMs). SMMs may be used as new data storage materials with much larger capacities than the current digital media. In addition, SMMs are potential candidates for quantum computing. His group has used far-IR (or terahertz), Raman, inelastic neutron scattering (INS) and quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) spectroscopies to probe magnetic transitions in SMMs and dynamics in the molecules.


James Plank
James Plank

James Plank is a Professor in the EECS department at the University of Tennessee. He received his BS from Yale in 1988, and his PhD from Princeton in 1993. He has been at the University of Tennessee ever since. Professor Plank's research has spanned many areas of computing, including checkpointing systems, wide-area storage systems, and erasure coding for storage systems. He has recently been researching software support for brain-inspired, "neuromorphic", computing, receiving funding from the Air Force Research Laboratory and Intel to explore novel nanotechnologies for computing. He has left a legacy of publicly available software that includes:

  • Jgraph -- a graph-plotting package for PostScript
  • Ickp - a checkpointing utility for the Intel Paragon
  • Libckpt - a checkpointing utility for Unix
  • IBP - Network storage depots and their client code
  • LoRS - Tools for aggregation of network storage depots
  • GF-Complete - A package for performing fast Galois Field arithmetic
  • Jerasure - A package for erasure coding
  • The TENNLab Exploratory Software Framework for Neuromorphic Computing
Jgraph, Libckpt and Jerasure have each have been used by over 100 academic and commercial institutions, including the software giants IBM, Microsoft, HP, Netapp and EMC.


Stefan Spanier
Stefan Spanier

Stefan Spanier is part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson (aka god-particle) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The experiment enters now a new era of precision measurements with unprecedented amount of data from particle collisions. The search for rare decays of the Higgs boson requires ever more innovative computing power. This includes machine learning search algorithms and front end computation for fast event filters, both applications for quantum computing. In 2026 the high-luminosity (HL-) LHC will start operation with unprecedented data accumulation. His interest in quantum computing relates to the application of quantum machine learning to event imaging at the HL-LHC. His work builds on his experience of implementing quantum algorithms on existing quantum computers (IBM-Q and IonQ), expertise in quantum machine learning, and experimental involvement at the LHC (CMS). Quantum circuits (both discrete-variable and continuous-variable platforms) and quantum annealing (DWave 2000Q) will be used for the development of quantum algorithms. Prototype algorithms addressing elementary aspects of event imaging at the HL-LHC will be implemented on currently and near-term available quantum computers while quantum simulators will be used for more realistic cases. Results will be compared with classical approaches (neural networks, etc.). Technological feasibility will be investigated for different platforms with the long-term goal being integration on a chip.


Jack Dongarra
Jack Dongarra

Jack Dongarra holds an appointment at the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Manchester. He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. He was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004; in 2008 he was the recipient of the first IEEE Medal of Excellence in Scalable Computing; in 2010 he was the first recipient of the SIAM Special Interest Group on Supercomputing's award for Career Achievement; in 2011 he was the recipient of the IEEE Charles Babbage Award; in 2013 he received the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award; and in 2019 he received the ACM/SIAM Computational Science and Engineering Prize. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Science, a foreign member of the British Royal Society, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.


Konstantinos D. Vogiatzis
Konstantinos D. Vogiatzis

Kostas Vogiatzis is a theoretical chemist with strong expertise in electronic structure theory and its application on catalysis, gas separations, and materials chemistry. He has been actively involved in the development of novel quantum chemical methods, with particular focus on strong correlation. Currently, his research team interfaces quantum chemistry with artificial intelligence and quantum information for the development of novel algorithms that can drive theoretical chemistry beyond its current capabilities.


Ryan Bennink
Ryan Bennink

Ryan Bennink has a Ph.D in optics from the University of Rochester and undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics. He studied abroad as a Marshall Scholar, was a Sproull Fellow at the University of Rochester, and joined ORNL as a Wigner Fellow. He has authored over 40 papers and conference presentations, won and led numerous research projects, served as institutional lead for large multiagency projects, and provided expertise to policy makers in Washington, D.C. Dr.Bennink has been researching quantum information and quantum optics for two decades. For the past decade his research interests have centered on modeling and simulation of quantum computation and developing new quantum computational methods. Prior to that, Dr. Bennink developed state-of-the-art entangled photon sources, authoring a definitive paper on their spatial and spectral properties and writing advanced simulation software that has guided experiments at ORNL and other leading research groups.


Lou Gross
Lou J. Gross

Louis J. Gross is a Chancellor’s Professor and Alvin and Sally Beaman Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics and has been a faculty member at the UTK since 1979. He is the Director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), a National Science Foundation-funded center to foster research and education at the interface between math and biology. He completed a B.S. degree in Mathematics at Drexel University and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. His research and education efforts have been continuously supported by awards from the National Science Foundation for over 25 years and since 1990 he has been a principal investigator on over $50M in external funding to UTK. He is the 2006 Distinguished Scientist awardee of the American Institute of Biological Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Society for Mathematical Biology.

His research interests range across quantitative biology with particular emphasis on ecology, epidemiology, and spatial control. Biological problems have regularly fostered novel quantitative methods and it is expected that this will arise as well as quantum methods are developed. Quantum methods will expand the educational challenges already present to enhance quantitative comprehension in the STEM workforce, and my experience over many years in quantitative education for life science students could provide guidance on expansion to incorporate novel methods as quantum algorithms arise.


Husheng Li
Husheng Li

Husheng Li received the BS and MS degrees in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he worked as a senior engineer at Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA. In 2007, he joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, as an assistant professor. He is promoted to full professor in 2019. His research is mainly focused on cyber physical systems, wireless communications, statistical signal processing and information theory. Dr. Li is the recipient of the Best Paper Awards of EURASIP Journal of Wireless Communications and Networks, 2005 and 2017, IEEE ICC 2011, IEEE SmartGridComm 2012, IEEE Globecom 2017, and the Best Demo Award of IEEE Globecom, 2010. His research interests include communications, information theory, and quantum technology.


Garriy Shteynberg
Garriy Shteynberg

Garriy Shteynberg is an associate professor of experimental psychology at the University of Tennessee. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Maryland and a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Oxford. His research is focused on the psychological mechanisms at the foundation of human sociality, with a special interest in the phenomenon of shared attention–occasions when people co-experience reality. In his research he seeks to understand how shared attention with other agents influences what people remember, the goals they pursue, and the things they value.


Vasileios Maroulas
Vasileios Maroulas

Vasileios Maroulas is a Professor of Mathematics with courtesy appointments at the Business Analytics and Statistics, and the Bredesen Center at the University of Tennessee. Vasileios Maroulas is also an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute and a co-Editor-in-Chief of Foundations of Data Science. His research interests span from computational statistics to applied probability and computational topology and geometry with applications in data analysis and quantum information. He received a PhD in Statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, and subsequently he was a Lockheed Martin Postdoctoral Fellow at the IMA at the University of Minnesota. He joined as an Assistant Professor the University of Tennessee in 2010, and he was a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at the University of Bath, UK during 2013-2014. His quantum areas of interest include: Quantum Nonparametric and Bayesian statistics; Quantum Topological Data Analysis; Quantum Machine Learning


Bing Qi
Bing Qi

Bing Qi received the B.S. degree in Physics from Nanjing University, Nanjing, China, in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree in Optical Instrument from Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China, in 1996. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Tsinghua University, China, from 1996 to 1999, a Visiting Scholar in Virginia Tech, USA, from 1999 to 2002. From 2002 to 2013, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher, a Research Associate and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Toronto, Canada. Currently, he is a Senior Research Scientist in Quantum Information Science Group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a Joint Faculty Associate Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Tennessee. His research interests include quantum communication and optical sensing.


Sergey Gavrilets
Sergey Gavrilets

Sergey Gavrilets is a theoretical biologist/applied mathematician who studies complex evolutionary processes. He is the Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is also the Associate Director for Scientific Activities at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), the Director of the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity (DySoC), the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a Research Associate at the School of Anthropology, University of Oxford. Sergey Gavrilets has been involved in trans-disciplinary research at the interface of biology, social sciences, mathematics, and computational science for most of his career. He has collaborated with researchers from biology, mathematics, primatology, anthropology, psychology, economics, computational science, and history. He has organized and run a variety of transdisciplinary working groups, workshops, and tutorials. His work has been supported by grants from the NIH, NSF, DOD, and John Templeton Foundation.


Cristian Batista
Cristian Batista

Cristian Batista is the Willis Lincoln Chair Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Tennessee. He has a joint appointment with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He is the deputy director of the Shull Wollan Center at ORNL. He works in the area of correlated electron systems with particular emphasis on quantum magnetism. He received his PhD in 1996 from the Intituto Balseiro (Bariloche, Argentina). In 2001, he became a J. R. Oppenheimer fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is fellow of the American Physical Society. Batista works in theoretical physics with emphasis in strongly interacting electron systems. His research tools combine analytical methods with numerical techniques for describing static and dynamical properties of many-body systems. He is interested in the novel states of matter that are realized in frustrated quantum materials and in finding efficient algorithms for the simulation of these systems. Quantum magnetism offers the simplest playground (purely bosonic systems) to study the multiplicity of exotic quantum states matter, ranging from multipolar orderings to spin liquids, that can emerge at low energies out of very simple competing interactions. The dynamical response of interacting quantum systems offers an invaluable tool for detecting proximity to novel quantum states of matter, as well as for characterizing these states. Developing experimental and theoretical tools for studying dynamical responses of quantum materials is crucial for the development of condensed matter physics. One of Batista’s current areas of research is the development of field theory techniques for computing dynamical responses of quantum magnets with strong quantum fluctuations. He is also developing new numerical algorithms for extending semi-classical approaches to itinerant systems. These tools are essential for interpreting neutron scattering data obtained at the Spallation Neutron Source of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).


Yuri Kamyshkov
Yuri Kamyshkov

Yuri Kamyshkov is Professor in UT Department of Physics and experimental particle physicist currently working in collaboration with ORNL on the search for fundamental processes involving oscillations of neutrons as a possible mechanism of answering questions of the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe and finding the nature of the Dark Matter. Professor Kamyshkov is at UT since 1991, first being for several years a join faculty with ORNL. He led high-energy physics group at UT funded by DOE-HEP since 2006. He is author and co-author of more than 200 papers including 8 renowned papers with more that 500 citations. In 2016 he got a Breakethrough-2016 Prize in Physics for his contributions to the KamLAND Neutrino Oscillations experiment in Japan. His current interests are in the study of the interaction with environment of the oscillating quantum systems, including effects of decoherence and the problem of “measurement” of the quantum systems, using the density matrix approach and Lindblad master equation for the formulation of the modern problems of Quantum Mechanics. This should be a valuable addition to the curriculum of the Quantum Mechanics, neutron, and particle physics graduate courses at UT.


Haixuan Xu
Haixuan Xu

Haixuan Xu earned his bachelor’s degree in Metallic Materials Engineering from the Dalian University of Technology (China) in 2005, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Florida in 2008 and 2010, respectively. In 2010, Dr. Xu joined Center of Defect Physics in Structural Materials, which is an Energy Research Frontier Center at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as a postdoctoral researcher where he worked on new kinetic Monte Carlo methods extending the time scale of traditional atomistic simulations to investigate long-term defect dynamics in advanced structural alloys. In 2013 Dr. Xu joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee and is investigating defect evolution and deformation mechanisms in advanced structural alloys, electromagnetic coupling and flexoelectric effects in heterostructured complex oxides, materials for neuromorphic computing, and mesoscale simulations methods, such as the Self-Evolving Atomistic Kinetic Monte Carlo (SEAKMC) approach. He is also interested in using quantum computing to materials simulations. Dr. Xu has authored or co-authored ~50 technical papers and has contributed to over 20 invited presentations at national and international conferences.


Lloyd M. Davis
Lloyd M. Davis

Lloyd M. Davis is BH Goethert Professor of Physics at the University of Tennessee Space Institute (UTSI), a graduate campus of the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Lloyd is a member of UTSI’s Center for Laser Applications, where he is involved in experimental research in nanophotonics, single-molecule spectroscopy, femtosecond laser materials interactions, and other laser applications. Lloyd completed his PhD in physics from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 1984, and since then he has taught over 75 graduate-level courses in physics, including nanophotonics, nonlinear optics, and quantum optics with introduction to quantum information. He is interested in developing a graduate-level interdisciplinary course to introduce quantum information and algorithms to engineering students, including mechanical and aerospace students at the UT Space Institute working in hypersonics and energy conversion research projects, which encompass chemical physics simulations that might benefit from quantum algorithms. Lloyd is a member of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and SPIE (http://spie.org/profile/Lloyd.M.Davis?SSO=1).


Hanno Weitering
Hanno H. Weitering

Hanno Weitering is the Head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee. He works in the area of experimental condensed matter physics, with special emphasis on the structure and electronic properties of surfaces, interfaces, epitaxial nanostructures and ultrathin film materials. His interests include correlated electron phenomena and electronic instabilities at surfaces, low-dimensional superconductivity, dilute magnetic semiconductors, and oxide heterostructures. Experimental techniques include molecular beam epitaxy, scanning probe microscopy, electron energy-loss spectroscopy, photoemission, as well as ex-situ transport and magnetic measurements via SQUID magnetometry. Most recently, Dr. Weitering has focused on doping studies of triangular, honeycomb, and kagome lattices on silicon surfaces, and on interface-enhanced superconductivity in 2D materials. He has published over 100 original research papers in mainstream physics journals. These have been cited over 4200 times with 11 articles > 100 citations (according to the Web of Science, April 2019, h=36). He has supervised or co-supervised 15 PhD students and 13 postdocs, and enjoy(ed) research funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and the Office of Naval research.


Marcel Demarteau
Marcel Demarteau

Marcel Demarteau is an experimental particle physicist currently leading the Physics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he is developing a dedicated program in fundamental physics with ambitious research projects in the areas of particle physics, heavy-ion collisions, neutron and neutrino physics, nuclear structure and astrophysics, and a nascent quantum information science program. An expert in particle collider physics and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, he leads research in the structure and evolution of the universe and chaired the first workshop on Quantum Sensing for High Energy Physics in 2017. His interest in Quantum Information Science relates to the application of engineered quantum states to address fundamental physics questions pertaining to the nature of energy, space and time.


Thomas Papenbrock
Thomas Papenbrock

Thomas Papenbrock is a professor in the Physics department with interests in nuclear theory, widely construed, and a Joint Faculty with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He specializes in systematic improvable models for atomic nuclei and in computing rare isotopes from scratch. Very recently, he became interested in quantum computing and performed the first computation of an atomic nucleus on a quantum chip. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.


Garrett S. Rose
Garrett S. Rose

Garrett S. Rose is an Associate Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of EECS. Prior to joining the University of Tennessee, he was a Senior Electronics Engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Information Directorate, Rome, NY from July 2011. While with AFRL, he led a variety of research efforts in the areas of hardware security and nanocomputing. As with his current research, these efforts were particularly focused on understanding potential security vulnerabilities and strengths in nanoelectronic computing systems. From August 2006 to May 2011, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Brooklyn, NY where he taught courses in the area of VLSI circuit design. From May 2004 to August 2005 he was with the MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, involved in the design and simulation of nanoscale circuits and systems. His current research is broadly focused in the area of nanoelectronic circuit design, with particular emphasis on emerging computer architectures and hardware security solutions based on nanoelectronic circuits.


Yuri Efremenko
Yuri Efremenko

Yuri Efremenko is Professor in the UT Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research interests lie in experimental high energy physics with focus on study neutrinos. Presently he is the spokesmen of the COHERENT experiment – experimental neutrino program at the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL. He held position of visiting scientist at Institute of Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo.


Ben Lawrie
Ben Lawrie

Ben Lawrie is a research scientist in the Quantum Information Science group at ORNL and a joint assistant professor in the Bredesen Center at the University of Tennessee. He received his PhD in interdisciplinary materials science from Vanderbilt University and has focused on experimental research in quantum sensing, quantum metrology, and quantum nanophotonics since then. His current research programs center on (1) milliKelvin optical and scanning probe microscopy of qubits, quantum sensors, and quantum materials, (2) optical and electron beam characterization of quantum nanophotonic systems, and (3) squeezed quantum sensors for microscopy and biosensing applications.


David Mandrus
David Mandrus

David Mandrus is the Jerry and Kay Henry endowed professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee. His research focuses on the design and discovery of new quantum materials, particularly in single crystal form. He is especially interested in physical realizations of the Kitaev model. This model Hamiltonian is characterized by emergent Majorana fermion excitations, and the scientific challenge is to find real materials that are described by the model. Such Kitaev materials may someday find use in topologically protected quantum computing. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher. In 2014 he was named one of only twelve "Moore Synthesis Investigators" by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.


Bruce MacLennan
Bruce MacLennan

Bruce MacLennan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UTK (since 1987); previously he was an Associate Professor and Acting Chair of the Computer Science Department of the Naval Postgraduate School (1979-87); and prior to that he was a Senior Software Engineer at Intel (1976-9), where he worked on the 8086 microprocessor and iAPX-432 micromainframe system. His PhD in computer science is from Purdue University (1975). For more than 30 years MacLennan's research has focused on artificial intelligence and future unconventional computing technologies, including neurocomputation, field computation, and quantum computation. In particular he has used Hilbert spaces as a common framework for modeling learning and other cognitive processes in the brain and as a basis for brain-inspired and quantum computer technologies. He has published three books and more than one hundred refereed journal articles and book chapters, mostly focused on artificial intelligence and unconventional computation. In his courses MacLennan also strives to prepare graduates to work in quantum computing and other future computing technologies; he has been teaching quantum computing to undergraduate and graduate students since 2012.


Remus Nicoara
Remus Nicoara

Remus Nicoara is a Professor in the UT Department of Mathematics, with a courtesy appointment at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. He is also the Director of Math Honors and Undergraduate Research, and many of his research projects involve working with undergraduates. Nicoara earned his Bachelor degree from University of Bucharest, and his PhD from University of California Los Angeles. His research interests lie in Von Neumann Algebras, with a focus on the theory of subfactors (inclusions of von Neumann algebras). This theory, initiated by Fields medalist V. Jones in the 80’s, has far reaching consequences to knot theory, representation theory, statistical mechanics, quantum field theory and quantum information theory. One of Nicoara’s current research focuses is on the classification of Complex Hadamard Matrices, with consequences to Quantum Information Theory through the existence of Mutually Unbiased Bases.


Kübra Yeter-Aydeniz
Kübra Yeter-Aydeniz

Kübra Yeter-Aydeniz is a postdoctoral research associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Quantum Information Science Group. She got her PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the area of theoretical high energy physics in 2010. She taught at the Coastal Carolina University as a visiting assistant professor after she graduated. Then she had been teaching at Tennessee Technological University for the last three years before she started working at ORNL. Although her PhD was on condensed matter applications of AdS/CFT correspondence she has been working in the field of quantum computing since she graduated. She worked on quantum computation of the scattering amplitudes in scalar quantum electrodynamics and simulating the scalar field theory on near-term quantum computers.


Alan Tennant
Alan Tennant

Alan Tennant is a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he is the Labwide Quantum Materials Initiative Lead. He is also the Director of the Shull Wollan Center at ORNL. Dr. Tennant earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Edinburgh and a doctorate in physics at the University of Oxford. His former posts include Chief Scientist of the ORNL Neutron Sciences Directorate and the Head of Institute of Complex Magnetic Materials at the Helmholtz Center Berlin, Germany. He has also held a number of teaching and scientific positions in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark. His research is primarily undertaken with neutron and xray scattering techniques on condensed matter systems, as well as complementary theoretical and computational studies. The main topics covered are: Fractionalisation of quantum numbers which can in principle occur in low dimensional or highly frustrated quantum magnets, physics at high magnetic fields and millikelvin temperatures, quantum magnetism and quantum phase transitions, and electronic states with strong correlations. Currently he is working on quantum glass formation, the application of topological concepts to materials including Weyl semimetals and spin liquids, topologically protected quantum states, correlation in disordered matter, fundamentals of transport theory, and the application of machine learning to scattering problems and magnetic simulations.


Travis Humble
Travis Humble

Travis Humble is a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and director of the lab's Quantum Computing Institute, where he oversees research and development of quantum computing technologies. He received his doctorate in theoretical chemistry from the University of Oregon before coming to ORNL in 2005. Dr. Humble is an associate professor with the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education at the University of Tennessee, Associate Editor for the Quantum Information Processing journal, and Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing. At the intersection of computing, physics, and information, his research focuses on the design, development, and benchmarking of new quantum computing platforms.


Raphael C. Pooser
Raphael C. Pooser

Raphael Pooser is an expert in continuous variable quantum optics. He has developed a program based on quantum sensing over a number of years at ORNL, followed by fledgling efforts in quantum computing. He has been working to demonstrate that continuous variable quantum optics, quantum noise reduction in particular, has important uses in the quantum information field. He is also interested in highlight the practicality of these systems, demonstrating their ease of use and broad applicability. Dr. Pooser heads up work in both experimental and theoretical quantum computing research. His goal is to show that quantum control and error correction required in sensing applications are directly applicable to quantum computing efforts. The deterministic nature of these systems is a strong draw and motivation that will eventually lead to practical applications. He has followed this model of quantum sensors as a showcase for the technologies that will enable quantum computing to good results.


Nicholas A. Peters
Nicholas A. Peters

Nicholas (Nick) A. Peters leads Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Quantum Information Science Group. He holds a joint faculty appointment with The University of Tennessee’s Bredesen Center. Dr. Peters earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. Suma Cum Laude in Physics and Mathematics from Hillsdale College. Prior to joining ORNL in 2015, he worked for approximately a decade at Telcordia Technologies/Applied Communications Sciences, formerly Bell Communications Research. Dr. Peters has been the lead Principle Investigator for multi-institution collaborations for The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program Office, and DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESR). His core expertise is in optical quantum state generation (especially entanglement), manipulation and measurement. His current research focuses on fundamental and practical aspects of quantum communications and networking. Dr. Peters has served as an Associate Editor for Optics Express since 2016.


Adam Holley
Adam Holley

Adam Holley is an Associate Professor of Physics at Tennessee Technological University and currently co-spokesperson for the UCNtau collaboration. With his group of undergraduate Physics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering majors, and in collaboration with groups at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Adam uses properties of the neutron to study the Standard Model experimentally, looking for signatures of new physical principles that might help us understand currently unexplained features of our universe. One aspect of this work involves studying the quantum mechanical behavior of ultracold neutrons that are trapped using large magnetic field gradients. Developing strategies for empirically assessing such systems, and finding high-fidelity, computationally efficient models for them, led Adam to become interested in theoretical and experimental techniques from quantum information science and how they can be applied to enhance the capabilities of low-energy precision studies of the Standard Model. Adam was a 2016 recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award.


Hong Guo
Hong Guo

Hong Guo is a professor at Department of Biochemistry & Cellular and Molecular Biology (BCMB). He is also a Principal Investigator at Center for Molecular Biophysics, UTK/Oak Ridge National Lab. Prof. Guo obtained his PhD degree in Chemical Physics from Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University in 1991. His research has focused on understanding structure and function of biopolymers such as proteins and determining catalytic mechanisms and origin of substrate/product specificity or promiscuity of enzymes. Prof. Guo applies different computational approaches in his research, including, but not limited to, molecular dynamics and free energy simulations with mixed quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical potentials and protein structure prediction. His lab also develops computational approaches for comparative analysis of different proteomes and apply machine learning to study biological systems.


Thanos Papanicolaou
Thanos Papanicolaou

Thanos Papanicolaou is a Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville and holds the Henry Goodrich Chair of Excellence. He is also the Chief Editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering – ASCE, as well as the Director of the UTK Hydraulics & Sedimentation Lab, and the NSF Intensively Managed Landscape Critical Zone Observatory (co-director). He and his team are currently focused in the following four major research areas: (1) Sedimentary process: clusters, gravel bed rivers, fluidization; (2) Flow-sediment interaction: turbulence, secondary flows, incipient motion; (3) Landscape processes: runoff & infiltration, upland erosion & deposition, bank erosion, landscape-stream connectivity, event based dynamics, soil organic matter; soil quality; sediment fingerprinting; and (4) Structures: fish passage, barbs &weirs; Best Management Practices. He has co-authored 120 peer-reviewed manuscripts in 60 different journals, which are having broad impacts. In addition, he has mentored 60 future scientists and engineers in the areas of watershed processes, hydraulics, and fluvial dynamics, where he is internationally recognized as a leading researcher. His annual external research grant expenditures in the last three years have surpassed $9 million from multiple funding agencies including the NSF, NASA, USDA, and USGS as well as the Departments of Agriculture and Transportation and Office of Naval Research. In recognition of his dedicated research, he has received the Distinguished Iowa Scientist from the Iowa Academy of Science, the ASCE Walter Huber Award (best under-40 researcher), the ASCE Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award and the Einstein award. He is a fellow of ASCE.


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