Below are the biographies of the panelists from the Quantum Internet Forum hosted by the FCC on December 15, 2020.
David Awshcalom
David Awschalom is the Liew Family Professor and Deputy Director of the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. He is also a senior scientist and the Director of Q-NEXT, a Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center at Argonne National Laboratory. As a physicist, his research focuses on quantum engineering by developing new methods to explore and control the quantum states of individual electrons, nuclei, and photons in the semiconductors. His work includes implementations of quantum information processing with applications in communication, sensing, and computing. Professor Awschalom has received a number of national and international awards, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences.
Alex Cronin
Alex Cronin is the Senior Quantum Coordinator for the National Quantum Coordination Office at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he helps coordinate QIS Programs across the Federal Government. Cronin is on detail from the National Science Foundation where he is a Program Director in the Physics Division. Cronin received a BS in Physics in from Stanford University in 1993, a PhD in Physics from the University of Washington in 1999, and was a postdoc at MIT from 1999-2002. Cronin was a Professor at the University of Arizona from 2002-2019 in the Department of Physics with a joint appointment in the College of Optical Sciences. Cronin’s research includes atom interferometry measurements of atom-surface van der Waals interactions, atomic polarizabilities, tune-out wavelengths, and quantum decoherence.
Tatjana Curcic, Ph.D.
Dr. Tatjana Curcic joined DARPA as a program manager in the Defense Sciences Office in October 2018. Her interests are in accelerating the development of quantum information technologies and discovering new applications in a range of areas from sensing to information processing with noisy qubits. Prior to joining DARPA, Curcic was a program officer at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for the Quantum Information Science and Atomic and Molecular Physics programs. She managed a portfolio that supported basic research on five continents. She has served on a number of government panels and boards, including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Quantum Information Science (QIS) Working Group. In 2017, Curcic served as the founding director of Quantum Valley Ideas Laboratories, a not-for-profit applied-research organization for the development of quantum technologies in Waterloo, Ontario. Earlier in her career, she worked as a science and technology consultant to DARPA, while employed by Booz Allen Hamilton. Curcic received her Master of Science and doctorate in physics from Cornell University, and her Bachelor of Science in physics from the University of Belgrade in Serbia.
Dominique M. Dagenais
Dominique M. Dagenais is Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), in the Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems, (ECCS), in the Engineering Directorate. Her interests focus on Photonics. After receiving her Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the Ecole Supérieure d'Optique in Orsay, France, she spent a year at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester where she defended a thesis on uniform pellet illumination for Laser fusion. She then joined the French Atomic Energy Commission, working on high power Nd:YAG laser propagation, before coming to the Boston area, where she developed beam shaping optics for CO2 lasers at the AVCO Everett Laboratories. In 1987 she joined the Naval Research Laboratory Optical Sciences division where she helped design and deploy the first three-axis fiber magnetic sensor, and demonstrated record sensitivity. In 1999 she joined Alcatel to support the development of novel optoelectronic active and passive devices for WDM fiber telecommunication. She has been at NSF since 2009.
Dr. Duncan Earl
Dr. Duncan Earl is the President and Chief Technology Officer at Qubitekk. Prior to co-founding Qubitekk, Dr. Earl spent 18 years as a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His research has been focused on the advancement of emerging optical technologies, most notably quantum information solutions. Dr. Earl has numerous technical papers and patents and has been committed to educating policy makers and legislatures on the expected near and long-term impacts of quantum technology.
Dirk Englund
Dirk Englund received his BS in Physics from Caltech in 2002. After a Fulbright fellowship at T.U. Eindhoven, he completed an MS in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 2008. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined Columbia University as Assistant Professor of E.E. and of Applied Physics. He joined the MIT EECS faculty in 2013. Major recognitions include the 2011 Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the 2011 Sloan Fellowship in Physics, the OSA's 2017 Adolph Lomb Medal, the Bose Research Fellowship in 2018, and a Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2020.
Saikat Guha
Saikat Guha is the Director of the Center for Quantum Networks, a multi-institution NSF Engineering Research Center building the entire technology and protocol stack to realize the Quantum Internet. Saikat is an Associate Professor at the College of Optical Sciences, at the University of Arizona. He received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2002, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 and 2008, respectively. From 2008 to 2017, he worked at Raytheon BBN Technologies, in Cambridge MA, where he was part of the core group that found the Quantum Information Processing group in 2009. In his most recent role at BBN as Lead Scientist, and at the University of Arizona, since 2017, he has led various projects in fundamental and applied research in photonic quantum information processing. Saikat's core research interests are in exploring quantum-mechanics-mandated ultimate performance limits of optical communications, quantum-secured communications and networking, and optical sensing and imaging---both in the evaluations of these limits using tools from quantum information and estimation theory, as well as in the design of near-term-realizable systems that can attain those limits. Much of his recent work has focused on the design of quantum repeaters to enable high-rate long-distance distribution of entanglement in the future quantum internet, using photons for quantum computing using so-called continuous-variable squeezed clusters states, and in employing novel pre-detection all-photonic transformations to attain unprecedented resolution improvements in optical sensing and imaging applications in astronomy and biological imaging. Saikat received the Raytheon 2011 Excellence in Engineering and Technology Award, Raytheon's highest technical honor, for work done by a team he led on the DARPA-funded Information in a Photon program. Saikat was a co-recipient of an honorable mention in NSA's 2016 Cybersecurity Best Paper Award for a paper on Quantum-Secure Covert Communication on Bosonic Channels. He was a recipient of Anita Jones Entrepreneurial Award 2013 from Raytheon BBN, and he was a co-recipient of a NASA Tech Brief Award for his work on quantum illumination. Saikat received the Raymie Stata Award for outstanding performance as Teaching Assistant for Signals and Systems, Fall 2005, from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT. Saikat was a member of India's first team to the International Physics Olympiad at Reykjavik in 1998, where he received an Honorable Mention and the European Physical Society (EPS) Award for the experimental component.
Dr. Carol Hawk
Dr. Carol Hawk is a Senior Technical Advisor for Advanced Scientific Computing Research in the Department of Energy Office of Science. Prior to this role she served as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Cybersecurity for Energy Delivery Systems in the DOE Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, and as program manager for Cybersecurity for Energy Delivery Systems R&D in the DOE Office of Electricity. Before joining DOE Carol performed operations research with the Center for Naval Analyses, researched fuel cell electrochemistry at the United Technologies Research Center and at the University of Connecticut, and worked in telecommunications at Bell Communications Research. Carol conducted her Ph.D. research in high-energy physics quantum chromodynamics at Rutgers University as a member of the Collider Detector at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Collaboration.
Venkata Josyula
Venkata Josyula is a Director in Verizon's Technology and Product Development team, driving emerging technologies to enable new products and services. He has 20+ years of experience working in various leadership and engineering roles and has led teams on IP / MPLS network architectures, traffic engineering and routing protocols, SDNs, cloud infrastructure, large scale platform and application development. His current areas of focus include cybersecurity, blockchain, A.I / ML and quantum communications.
Paul G. Kwiat
Paul G. Kwiat is the Bardeen Chair in Physics, at the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champaign, and is the inaugural Director of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST). A Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, he has given invited talks at numerous national and international conferences, and has authored over 160 articles on various topics in quantum optics and quantum information, including several review articles. His research focuses on optical implementations of quantum information protocols, particularly using entangled—and hyperentangled—photons from parametric down-conversion. He received the Optical Society of America 2009 R. W. Wood Prize, as the primary inventor of the world’s first sources of polarization-entangled photons from down-conversion, which have been used for quantum cryptography, dense-coding, quantum teleportation, quantum metrology, and realizing optical quantum gates. He has also done pioneering work on high-efficiency single-photon detectors, frequency-upconversion-based detection, and high-speed quantum random number generation.
Thaddeus Ladd
Thaddeus Ladd is a career quantum information physicist with expertise across experimental and theoretical quantum optics and quantum semiconductor device physics. Spanning academia and industry, Thaddeus has emphasized the practical application of semiconductor engineering to quantum information processing, both for qubits and for quantum network systems. Thaddeus received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2005 as a fellow of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation; the then began developing quantum networking architectures for the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, while still based at Stanford. In 2009, Thaddeus moved to HRL Laboratories, LLC in Malibu, California where he is now a principal scientist and group lead. He has recently taken a role as co-design lead and technology roadmapping lead in quantum communication for the new Q-NEXT Quantum Information Science center, part of the National Quantum Initiative.
Marco Pistoia
Marco Pistoia, Ph.D. is Managing Director, Head of Research and Engineering at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Formerly, he was a Senior Manager, Distinguished Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he managed an international team of researchers responsible for Quantum Computing Algorithms and Applications. He is the inventor of 226 patents, granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and 285 patent-pending applications, 30 of which are in the area of Quantum Computing. Dr. Pistoia received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from New York University in 2005. He has written two books and over 400 scholarly articles on various aspects of Program Analysis, Language-Based Security, and Quantum Computing. Dr. Pistoia has been the recipient of several awards, including five ACM/IEEE Best Paper Awards. Dr. Pistoia has lectured at numerous research institutions worldwide, including Harvard, MIT, ETH Zürich, The Royal Society of London, Technion, University of Maryland, Dartmouth College, École Normale Supérieure, University of Melbourne, and Chalmers University of Technology.
Dr. Kathy-Anne Brickman Soderberg
Dr. Kathy-Anne Brickman Soderberg is a Principal Research Physicist at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Information Directorate in Rome, NY. Dr. Soderberg is the principal investigator and group leader for AFRL’s Trapped-Ion Quantum Networking group. Dr. Soderberg received a B.S. in physics from the College of William and Mary, a M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Soderberg has over fifteen years of technical experience in atomic physics and quantum information processing. Her graduate work focused on trapped-ion quantum computing research and included key demonstrations of phonon-mediated entangling gates and proof-of-principle quantum algorithms. Her postdoctoral work focused on novel neutral-atom quantum computing and the difficulties associated with targeted atomic interactions and optical lattice translation and control. Before joining AFRL, Dr. Soderberg was a technical consultant for quantum information sciences.