Research / Quantum & Computer Science

Quantum & Computer Science

Overview

Mathematics is my primary area of study and interest, and I think of it as the base layer everything else here sits on: computer science is a branch of applied mathematics, and data science and analytics are its close cousins, each a narrower, more specific application of it. If I had to rank how I think of myself, it would be mathematician, then theorist, then quantum theorist, even though my industry experience is in software and data science. Analysis, proofs, building algorithms and formulas, and optimization are the crafts I am still practicing, and they run through everything on this page.
I am still early, a first-year M.S. student building my footing, and I am bridging toward quantum from my work as an engineer and data scientist. My interest in quantum is that of a mathematician and computer scientist: linking the theory to what it can compute, not just the algorithmic payoff but the mathematical physics underneath it. That is narrower than physics generally: quantum engineering, quantum information, and quantum computing specifically, which is why this page groups quantum with computer science instead of splitting theory from application. My focus is quantum algorithms and the mathematics of quantum computation: optimization and routing methods for quantum computers (the thread that started with ion routing at Quantinuum), operator selection for variational algorithms (the thread from my ADAPT-VQE work), and the mathematical and computational advantages they unlock. The end state I am working toward is research engineer or scientist in quantum algorithms, with the masters as the next step and likely a PhD after.
The standard here is the one I hold as a researcher: sources, methods, and conclusions judged on the evidence, independent of the personal commitments elsewhere on this site. My political views are disclosed on their own page and are not premises in this work; my spiritual life is personal and individual and makes no claims on this page. The names below mark intellectual debts and methods, not endorsements of the people behind them.

Influences

Mathematicians & physicists who inspired me, and who line up with what I care about most. A few of these entries carry an erased-and-recovered story alongside the math; I've noted it where that's true:
  • - Euler: turned a walk over seven bridges into nodes and edges and opened graph theory
  • - Leibniz & Descartes: the notation and coordinates I still reason in. Fermat worked out the same coordinate-geometry method independently around the same time (a manuscript circulated in 1636, based on results from 1629) but never published it in his lifetime, so Descartes's 1637 La Géométrie got the name
  • - Émilie du Châtelet: translated and extended Newton's Principia and showed that a moving body's energy scales with the square of its velocity, work that survives in the modern kinetic-energy formula.* Filed for two centuries as Voltaire's mistress before historians recredited the physics to her. The erased story is part of why she's here
  • - Alan Turing: in 1936 made computation itself a mathematical object and proved hard limits on what any machine can decide. He didn't do it alone in the way the story usually gets told: Rózsa Péter did the foundational work of recursion theory proper (Gödel himself insisted the field's name belonged to her kind of work, not Turing's or Church's), and the sequential test he used at Bletchley (Banburismus) matched, independently, what Abraham Wald published as the war was ending, rebuilding his career in exile from the Holocaust that killed his family. Turing himself was prosecuted in 1952 for being gay, chemically castrated, and dead two years later. The math stands on its own. The erasure around it is part of why he's on this list
  • - Schrödinger: built the wave equation at the heart of the quantum side, extending Louis de Broglie's 1924 matter-wave hypothesis into the equation that carries his name*
  • - Lynn Conway: joined IBM Research in 1964 and by late 1965 had invented generalized dynamic instruction scheduling, foundational to the out-of-order execution common in modern processors. IBM fired her in 1968 when she disclosed she was transitioning. She rebuilt her career under a new identity, kept her IBM history hidden for over 30 years, and went on to co-write the Mead-Conway VLSI design rules at Xerox PARC that reshaped how chips get designed. She came out publicly and reconnected her name to the IBM work in 1999; IBM apologized and gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. A different erasure than Turing's (gender identity, not sexual orientation), and she's on this list for the same reason: the engineering doesn't stand apart from what almost buried it
Graph theory, topology, and quantum are the areas I keep coming back to.

Research History

Soley Research Group
Predoctoral Research Assistant, Aug 2024 – Nov 2025. ADAPT-VQE for a non-Hermitian (CAP) model Hamiltonian: ansatz and wavefunction analysis, a custom pseudovariance diagnostic, and excited states via VQD. In plain terms: testing smarter ways for a quantum computer to find a system's energy levels. I did this work from Iowa State as an outside collaborator rather than as a member of the group, so I am not listed on its roster. The correspondence documenting the collaboration is private, so until I publish something citable from this line of work, read this card as my own account.
More Details →
Quantinuum
Compiler Engineer Intern, May 2022 – Aug 2022. Graph-search algorithms for ion routing and a movement-simulation sandbox on a trapped-ion quantum compiler: graph theory doing real quantum work.
Mentor & Reference
Dr. Micheline Soley, PI of the Soley Research Group, mentored my ADAPT-VQE work.
Independent Research
Self-directed quantum work; writeups will land here when published.

Aspirations

Institutes I Follow
To be clear: my only current affiliations are my employer (defense-sector R&D) and Colorado School of Mines (school). A few groups whose work shapes how I see the field, and that I would be honored to work with one day: Quantinuum (incl. the former Cambridge Quantum; the one I have actually worked with, as a 2022 intern) · IBM Quantum · IQC Waterloo · Niels Bohr Institute.

Projects

Notes

  1. On the vis viva claim. The specific claim: in her 1740 Institutions de Physique, du Châtelet argued that a moving body's force (vis viva) scales with mv2, siding with Leibniz in the standing mv versus mv2 dispute and drawing on the falling-weight experiments of Willem 's Gravesande, whose results she synthesized into the theory rather than repeated herself. The quantity survives in modern form as kinetic energy, KE = ½mv2. ↩
  2. On Schrödinger. Schrödinger's life outside physics is part of the record here too. In Vienna in the 1920s he began tutoring Ithi Junger when she was 14 and he was 39; biographers record that the relationship became sexual in her late teens. When an Irish Times investigation revisited this and similar relationships in December 2021, Trinity College Dublin's physics department responded by renaming its Schrödinger Lecture Theatre in 2022. A 2026 academic paper disputes how these claims have circulated, arguing the coverage drew on unprofessional biographical writing and poor journalism; that dispute is noted, not adjudicated, here. The wave equation and the conduct both belong to the same person, credited for one and held accountable for the other, without erasing either. ↩