EPiQC Students Soar

Congratulations to Prakash Murali (Princeton), Lia Yeh (UCSB), Emma Dasgupta (UChicago) and Thomas Propson (UChicago)!

Graduate student Prakash Murali (Princeton) was awarded a prestigious 2020 IBM PhD fellowship.  For 70 years IBM has recognized and rewarded outstanding PhD students around the world through a highly competitive PhD Fellowship Award program. The distinguished 2020 IBM PhD Fellowship Award Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which recognizes and supports exceptional PhD students who want to make their mark in promising and disruptive technologies.  His advisor Margaret Martonosi, H. T. Adams ‘35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, explained why the fellowship was well deserved. “This is for his outstanding work on toolflows and architectural issues for quantum computing systems. In addition to an impressive set of outstanding papers in general, he’s also had a very successful long-term collaboration with IBM, including a stint there last summer that led to his recent ASPLOS paper

EPiQC undergraduates have also received a slew of recognition. Thomas Propson (UChicago) who has worked on both QC architecture and hardware with Fred Chong and David Schuster was awarded a Barry Goldwater Scholarship based on academic merit in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. “If I had to summarize my current career goal in a sentence: I want to create technology that improves the quality of people’s lives,” he said. (see UChicago story)

Lia Yeh, a UCSB undergraduate who worked with EPIQC team members at Princeton during the Summer, 2019 Princeton-IBM QURIP program, has received several honors.  First, Lia received a Clarendon Award fellowship to attend Oxford University that includes a full scholarship for her PhD studies in quantum computing.  Second, Lia has been named a recipient of the prestigious US National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. Third, Lia along with Emma Dasgupta (UChicago) brought home the undergraduate gold and bronze medals in the ACM Student Research Competition at the MICRO52 Symposium.  Both of these medals pertained to EPIQC-related QURIP projects that Lia and Emma performed at Princeton and IBM in Summer 2019.  The ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), sponsored by Microsoft, offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research at well-known ACM sponsored and co-sponsored conferences before a panel of judges and attendees. Emma who also worked with Margaret Martonosi won third place for her poster “Statistical Assertions for Debugging in Qiskit”. During the academic year, she works in the Chong group.

As first place winner in the SIGMICRO level of the competition, Lia advanced to the AMC Grand Finals for her work on “Benchmarking ZX-Calculus Circuit Optimization Against Qiskit Transpilation”.  

Bravo!