I am currently a Postdoc jointly at the University of Tokyo and Quemix Inc. and as such a member of the SQAI – Center of Innovation for Sustainable Quantum AI. My research mainly concerns algorithms for gate based quantum computation, quantum annealing and machine learning techniques at the interface with materials science and optimization problems. This is done by either working directly on quantum computers or by using classical simulation.

Academic history

I started studying Physics in Hamburg in 2013 and from the beginning was mainly interested in theoretical physics. My Bachelor’s thesis was in condensed matter physics on the Kondo effect supervised by Michael Potthoff and Mirek Hänsel.

I went to Munich for my Master’s to study Theoretical and Mathematical Physics and took classes ranging from differential geometry, string theory, quantum electro dynamics to general relativity. My main interest was on the interface between statistical physics and probability theory. My Master’s thesis in probability was supervised by Martin Heydenreich and Christian Hirsch. I worked on a toy model inspired by biological neural networks, and the thesis research also resulted in a reviewed paper.

I finally pursued this direction with a Ph.D. under the supervision of Fabio Martinelli in Rome to work on Kinetically constrained models which are a mathematical model of glass forming liquids. This resulted in my Ph.D. thesis and two standalone papers for the two subjects I cover in my thesis. The first half of my thesis is published in a paper with Fabio Martinelli and the second half is published as a single author paper.

Following my Ph.D. I decided to continue in a more physical research direction and started a Postdoctoral research in quantum computing under the supervision of Matsushita Yu-ichiro at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and since March 2024 at the University of Tokyo. Our goal is to find quantum algorithms that provide actual real world use cases for quantum computers at the interface of optimization problems and materials science.

Coding

During my time in Munich I have also started working for a startup in which I learned the ropes of working in a team in git and writing well documented code. Besides implementing machine learning algorithms in, among other things, speech recognition, I also devised and implemented more classical algorithms on graphs in Python. My biggest project included working with linguists and translating a natural language text into a graph structure which is machine-readable and analysable. Part of my duties also included overseeing the open tickets on a backend project assigned to me and making sure that coding standards were respected.

After my Ph.D. I entered Quemix Inc. (my current affiliation), in which I mainly used Python to implement and execute quantum algorithms using simulator or real hardware. To compare with classical benchmarks I have also used Fortran to implement scientific simulation software. This has allowed me to learn how to schedule projects assigned to me within the time frame of customers and hone the skills of producing research paper worth outputs from start to finish.

Some of my personal coding projects in C and Python are presented in the projects tab and my github contains other smaller contributions to open software projects.

In 2020, during quarantine, I have worked through textbooks OS-programming with the eventual goal of working on the Linux kernel.

Away from keyboard

Languages

Besides theoretical physics and coding, language learning is a big passion of mine. I grew up in a Franco-German family and assimilated the English language mostly through the internet and the Italian language during my stay in Rome. When I was 18 I started studying Japanese and am currently studying for the Level Pre-1 of the Kanji aptitude test. My passion for Chinese characters and my desire to understand more the origins of the written Japanese language finally also led me to pick up studying Mandarin.

Hiking

When I am not doing Mathematics, coding or learning languages I love doing badminton, outdoor sports and in particular hiking and trekking. Besides frequent of day-trips in whichever region I currently find myself in, I have also completed a 30 day, 550km trek with a friend starting in Austria, going through Slovenia and ending in Italy.