Kasra Sardashti joined the University of Maryland in 2024 as an Assistant Professor of Physics and a Principal Investigator at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences. Before UMD, Kasra was an Assistant Professor of Physics & ECE at Clemson University. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from UC San Diego in 2016. Afterward, he was a Research Scientist at the Center for Quantum Phenomena at New York University.
Kasra’s research group, the Laboratory for Band Engineering of Quantum Systems (LaBEQs), works on a wide range of projects that aim to demonstrate high-performance solid-state electronics for quantum information processing, sensing, and communication. Since its establishment in 2021, the group has enjoyed support from multiple federal funding agencies including NSF, DOE, AFOSR, and DARPA. Kasra is also a recipient of the 2021 ORAU Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award.
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Centers & Institutes: Laboratory for Physical Sciences; Quantum Materials Center
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Centers & Institutes: Quantum Materials Center
Ronald Walsworth earned his B.S. in Physics from Duke University and his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University. His research interests are in developing precision measurement tools and applying them to diverse problems across the physical and life sciences. Walsworth is the recipient of the Francis Pipkin Award in Precision Measurements from the American Physical Society; the Smithsonian Institution Exceptional Service Award; and the Duke University Faculty Scholar Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and serves as a Distinguished Traveling Lecturer for the Division of Laser Science of the American Physical Society. Walsworth is also a Minta Martin Professor in the UMD Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Founding Director of the Quantum Technology Center.
Alicia Kollár received her B.A. in Physics from Princeton University in 2010 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2016. In her doctoral studies with Benjamin Lev, she worked on the design and construction of a multimode cavity-BEC apparatus to study superradiant self-organization. She was awarded a Princeton Materials Science Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2017 to work with Andrew Houck on quantum simulation of solid-state physics using circuit QED lattices. Her research will focus on using novel coplanar waveguide lattice techniques and graph theory to design and realize microwave photonic crystals with unusual structures such as gapped flat bands and spatial curvature. She will combine these structures with multimode/waveguide circuit QED to engineer quantum simulators of lattice and spin models.
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Centers & Institutes: Joint Quantum Institute, Quantum Technology Center
Edo Waks received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University while working with Professor Yoshihisa Yamamoto in the area of quantum optics and quantum information. After graduating, he became a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, working with Professor Jelena Vuckovic in the Ginzton Laboratory on nanophotonic implementations of quantum information processing, before joining the ECE Department as assistant professor for the Fall 2006 semester. He received his B.S. and M.S. from the Electrical Engineering Department at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.
Waks is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow and was a member of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society, at Stanford. He won the Department of Central Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellowship Award sponsored by the Army Research and Development Activity, which funded his postdoctoral research. He received a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship (1996-1999), and the William Huggins Award for Outstanding Achievement in Computer and Electrical Engineering, from Johns Hopkins University (1995). He holds appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Reasearch in Electronics and Applied Physics
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Notable Publications:
Centers & Institutes: Joint Quantum Institute, Quantum Technology Center