People

Cosmin Andrei

Cosmin is a master student in ECE from Romania. He completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton as a Physics major. He is a part of the protected qubits team. Outside of the lab Cosmin dances with BodyHype dance company, plays badminton and loves trying out new restaurants in the Princeton area.

Harshvardhan Babla

Harsh majored in Electrical Engineering with a focus in Quantum Information, along with certificates in Engineering Physics, Applied Math, and Computer Science.

His work includes characterizing fabrication techniques for Tantalum-based circuits and developing surface treatment recipe for sapphire, to reduce two level system…

Debopriyo Biswas
BA Physics, Princeton University (2019)
Debo started working with the group in 2017 on circuit quantum electrodynamics. He is currently a graduate student at the University of Maryland
Matthew Bland

Matthew is a second year graduate student working to improve the coherence times of superconducting qubits through materials-based advancements and device architecture. He grew up in Northern Virginia and received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University. In his free time, he likes to play soccer, travel,…

Jake Bryon
A.B Physics, University of California, Berkeley (2018)

Jake is a sixth year graduate student from Wilmington NC and completed his bachelors at the University of California, Berkeley majoring in physics. He researches the fluxonium qubit investigating the effects of time-dependent flux as well as methods to improve and understand the coherence life time.  

Outside of the lab Jake…

William Cody Burton
Ph.D Physics, MIT (2018)
B.A Physics, Princeton University (2012)
Cody completed his senior thesis in our group, looking at tunable coupling in 3D cavities. He often sports a snazzy briefcase. He currently works as an AMO scientist at Honeywell Quantum Solutions.
Annie Carroll

Annie majored in Physics. She is studied line-graph lattices which are realizable using superconducting circuits to simulate condensed matter systems.

Annie is also got a certificate in French, and enjoys reading, cooking, being outside, and playing with animals in her free time. 

Christie Chiu
Ph.D. 2019, Physics, Harvard
B.S. 2013, Physics and Applied Math, MIT

Christie was a Princeton Materials Science Postdoctoral Fellow exploring novel lattice geometries to study condensed matter systems with superconducting circuits. She completed her graduate work on Markus Greiner's Fermi gas microscope probing the Hubbard model with ultracold lithium atoms in an optical lattice.

Jeremiah Coleman
B.S. Engineering Physics & B.A. Economics, Stanford University (2021)

Jeremiah is a third year graduate student working on fabricating novel junctions, such as quantum phase slip wires, with spinodal materials for new protected qubits. He is from Los Angeles, CA and enjoys playing all types of games from spikeball and volleyball to board games and videogames. Beach days are also my favorite days.

Marius Constantin
Ph.D. Applied Physics, Yale University (2019)
B.A Physics, Princeton University (2014)

Marius was an undergraduate in the Houck Lab from 2013-2014 and worked on lattice circuit QED systems. He went on to become a graduate student at Yale and currently works as a risk associate at Goldman Sachs

Xanthe Croot

Xanthe is currently a professor at the University of Sydney Australia. Xanthe was a Dicke Fellow originally from Australia. Her research was focussed on protected superconducting qubits. She completed her PhD at the University of Sydney, where she worked on scalable readout and coupling schemes for GaAs-based spin qubits. When not in lab, she…

Kevin D Crowley
B.S. Physics, University of California, San Diego (2016)

Kevin is a sixth year graduate student from San Rafael, CA. He received his B.S. in Physics from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently working to improve the coherence times of superconducting qubits generally. In his free time he likes to take shade under the rolling hills of the Pacific Ocean.

Mattias Fitzpatrick
Ph.D Electrical Engineering, Princeton University (2019)
B.A Physics Middlebury College (2013)
Mattias hails from the great state of Oregon and is a graduate of Middlebury College. He became a member of the lab in 2013 and worked on nonequilibrium phase transitions in the Jaynes-Cummings lattice.
Youqi Gang
Youqi is a senior majoring in Electrical Engineering with certificates in Engineering Physics and Applications of Computing. She explores ways to tune superconducting qubits post-fabrication for quantum simulation and also works on improving the coherence time of transmon qubits. Outside of lab Youqi is a theater enthusiast.
Joonas Govenius
Bachelors, Princeton University

Joonas was our first undergraduate from 2009-2010. He worked on ultrastrong coupling in cQED in both theory and experiment. He went on to become a graduate student in Helsinki.

Charlie Guinn

Charlie is a fifth year grad student from Fort Wayne, Indiana and got his bachelors in applied physics at Purdue University. He works on engineering novel couplers for transmon qubits and benchmarking two qubit gates.Outside the lab he likes to rock climb, read sci-fi, and cook.

Andras Gyenis
Princeton University, Ph.D. 2016
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, M.Sc., B.Sc. 2010.
Andras has a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton where he worked in the Yazdani lab working on strongly correlated and topological electronic systems. Currently, his research is focused on the new generation of protected superconducting qubits. He hails from Hungary and is a rugged outdoorsman.
Thomas Hazard
Ph.D Physics, Princeton University (2019)

Tom comes from sunny Southern California. He became a member of the lab since 2017 and worked on topologically protected qubits. He loves baking bread and loafing around.

Anthony Hoffman
Ph.D. Electrical Engineering - Princeton University (2009)
B.S. Physics - University of Maryland Baltimore County (2004)

Anthony Hoffman is a former postdoc who helped build the lab from 2008-2011. He is now a professor at Notre Dame, working on quantum terahertz devices. He loves angry birds and hates 7.22 GHz.

Andrew Houck
Professor at Princeton University
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2005
B.S.E., Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, 2000

Quantum mechanics has played an ever-increasing role in electronics over the past several decades. At first, materials and devices were introduced that were designed with quantum mechanical principles, but still operated on classical information (for example, the silicon transistor). More recently, devices have been developed to store and…

Berthold Jaeck
PhD 2015, Physics, Ecole Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne
Berthold received his PhD in physics from the Ecole Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne in 2015. He joined the Physics Department at Princeton University as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Humboldt foundation in 2016.
Parth Jatakia
B.Tech in Engineering Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (2020)
M.Tech in Engineering Physics with specialization in Nanoscience, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (2020)

Parth is a fourth year graduate student originating from Mumbai, India. He is currently working on developing architectures that protect qubit from environmental noise. He is looking into the optimization of the fluxonium qubit that also provides disjoint support. In his free time, he enjoys photography, late-night walks and yoga.

Inci Karaaslan
Inci is a second year undergraduate student at Princeton University from Istanbul, Turkey. She works on characterizing qubits with embedded qubit control systems, primarily focusing on multi-qubit measurements on Quantum Machines. Outside of the lab Inci spends time creating illustrations, travelling, and playing tennis.
Alicia Kollár
PhD 2016, Stanford (advisor Benjamin Lev)
Alicia Kollár was a Princeton Materials Science Postdoctoral Fellowship with Andrew Houck from 2017-2019, working on quantum simulation of solid-state physics using circuit QED lattices (hyperbolic and flat-band lattices). She is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, where he research will focus on using novel coplanar…
Lev Krayzman

Lev is a Postdoctoral Research Associate. He did his PhD in Rob Schoelkopf's lab, studying superconducting thin-film 3D resonators for quantum information storage. He is currently working on fluxonium qubits.

Shashwat Kumar
BS & MS, Physics, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali (2021)

Shashwat is a third-year graduate student in ECE from Bijnor, India. He completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, India, in 2021. He's currently working in the protected qubits team. Besides the lab, he likes to travel, hike, and work out.

Hoang Le
Hoang is a senior in Electrical Engineering at Princeton with a certificate in Engineering Physics. He explores novel qubit species with better encoding scheme and also studies the surface losses of tantalum qubits, aiming at higher qubit coherence times. Hoang has fourteen years of experience in documenting trains and remote stations in Vietnam,…
Zhaoqi Leng
Engineering Physics, B.S. Cornell 2014
Zhaoqi Leng joined the lab in 2015. He worked on creating and stabilizing entanglement in circuit QED systems. He is researching new optimization/machine learning methods for quantum control and readout.
Jocelyn Liu
B.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Southern California (2023)

Jocelyn is a first year graduate student from McLean, VA. She received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, and is currently working on fluxonium qubits and broadly interested in engineering novel error-protected devices. In her free time, she enjoys painting, weightlifting, and traveling (and is also a…

Yanbing Liu
Ph.D Electrical Engineering, Princeton University (2016)
B.S. Physics Tsinghua University (2010)
Yanbing Liu pioneered the work on photonic bound states in the Houck lab and now is a quantitative researcher at Trade Link in Chicago.
Jeronimo Martinez
B.A. Physics, University of Chicago (2019)

Jeronimo is a fourth year graduate student on the quantum simulation side of the group working on realizing Bose-Hubbard lattices with flatbands using superconducting circuits. He grew up in Miami, Florida but is originally from Mexico and really enjoys the deer, foxes, and large trees of Princeton. In his free time he enjoys rock climbing,…

Elizabeth Medina

Elizabeth is a fourth year Electrical and Computer Engineering student hailing from Tampa, FL. Over the summer, she did some research with solid state and molecular qubits at the University of Chicago; currently, however, she’s interested in learning more about superconducting qubits here in the Houck Lab. She enjoys stargazing, baking cookies,…

Connie Miao
Connie studied Physics with a a certificate in Applications of Computing. For her thesis, she is working on designing a more fault-tolerant zero-pi qubit. Previously, she has also worked on FPGA-based qubit control in the Houck Lab. When she's not in the lab or debugging code, she's probably hunting down good eats, exploring the science of bread…
Matthew Molinelli
B.S. Applied Physics, Columbia University (2022)

Matthew is a second year graduate student from Greenwich, CT. He completed his B.S. in Applied Physics from Columbia University and is now working with the quantum simulation group to explore superconducting qubit lattices in the Bose-Hubbard model. Outside the lab, he enjoys board games, soccer, and rock climbing.

Pranav Mundada
Master of Science in Physics from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) [2016]
Bachelor of Science (Research) in Physics with Distinction from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) [2015]
Pranav hails from Nasik, the wine capital of India, but he does not know his wines. On finding a problem interesting and impactful enough, he does not hesitate to jump outside his area of expertise. He develops protected qubit designs, crosstalk suppressing quantum architectures and novel optimal control schemes for implementing qubit gates. He…
Zander Pease
A.B Physics, Princeton University (2012)
Alexander Pease was a senior in our research group. His senior thesis involved fabricating extremely low frequency cavities to look at strong coupling in a highly multimode structure. He currently works as a partner at Product Co-op.
Alex Place
Alex finished his PhD with the group in 2022. He built and studied qubits which are intrinsically insensitive to noise. Alex grew up in Arlington VA and received his B.S. in physics from Caltech. Outside of lab Alex coached the Degenerate Dopers (the department softball team)  and enjoyed play sports, backpacking, and skiiing. 
Anjali Premkumar
Ph.D Electrical Engineering, Princeton University (2023)
B.S Applied Physics, Caltech (2017)

Anjali is PhD graduate from the Houck Lab who defended in the summer of 2023. She is from Pittsburgh, PA and she did her undergraduate studies in Applied Physics at Caltech. She enjoys singing and dancing, especially to Taylor Swift songs. Her favorite season is summer, and her favorite ice cream is dark chocolate. She is exploring 0-pi and…

Henry Prestegaard
A.B. Physics, Dartmouth College (2022)

Henry is a second year graduate student from Fairfield CT. He completed his bachelors at Dartmouth College majoring in physics. He currently works on two qubit gates. Outside of the lab he collects vinyl and loves to ski.

James Raftery
Ph.D Electrical Engineering, Princeton University (2016)
M.A Electrical Engineering, Caltech (2018)
B.S.E Electrical Engineering, Princeton University (2006)
ames Raftery is a second year graduate student. He was a Princeton undergraduate, went to work for a few years, but just could not stay away. He returned to Princeton to study condensed matter physics with photons and is now a research staff member at IBM.
Darius Sadri
Ph.D. Stanford University
Darius Sadri was postdoc in our group. He has a PhD from Stanford in string theory, did a postdoc in condensed matter theory, and is now learning to be a quantum experimentalist.
Arthur Safira
Ph.D Physics, Harvard University (2018)
M.A Computer Science, Harvard University (2015)
B.S Physics, Princeton University (2012)
Arthur Safira was a senior in his second year in our group, and worked on very large arrays of transmon qubits. He currently works as a hardware and software engineer at Waymo.
Will Shanks
Ph.D. Yale University
Will E. "Coyote" Shanks was a post-doc in our lab. He earned his PhD at Yale measuring persistent currents in normal metal rings, and is now built a scanning qubit experiment to image photons in large arrays. The Coyote is now a research staff member at IBM
Nana Shumiya
Ph.D. 2022, Physics, Princeton University
B.A. 2016, Physics, University of California, Berkeley

Nana is a PQI Postdoctoral Fellow originally from Tokyo, Japan. Her research focuses on exploring new material systems to improve coherence of superconducting qubits. In her Ph.D., she worked in Hasan lab to study the electronic and magnetic structures and properties in various topological systems using scanning tunneling microscopy.

Basil Smitham
B.S. in Physics, Yale. 2016
Basil joined the Houck Lab in 2017. He works on the quantum simulation side of the group, researching nonlinear physics in high kinetic inductance resonator lattices.
Srikanth Srinivasan
Ph.D Princeton University
Srikanth Srinivasan was brave enough to be the first graduate student in the Houck Lab. While he was a graduate student, he worked on both the tunable coupling qubit and photon blockade experiments. After leaving Princeton he joined the research staff at IBM before returning to Princeton again for a post-doc with Nathalie de Leon.
Neereja Sundaresan
PhD Princeton University (2018)
Neereja became a member of the lab in the spring of 2013. She studied the ultra-low frequency regime in circuit QED and explored the interactions that arise when a single qubit is strongly coupled to multi-mode cavity.
Sara Sussman
B.A Physics, Boston University (2018)

Sara is a 5th year graduate student working on two-qubit gates and RFSOC based qubit control. Outside of lab she enjoys exploring new places, running and hanging out with friends.  

Devin Underwood
Ph.D. Princeton University
B.S Physics and Mathematics University of Wisconsin- River Falls
Devin Underwood works on arrays of cQED elements for purposes of studying condensed matter physics with photons. He hales from frosty Alaska, and is known for wearing strange clothes during talks.

Devin is now a member of the research staff at HRL.

Katherine Van Kirk
MASt Applied Mathematics ("Part III"), Cambridge University (2020)
B.S.H Engineering Physics, Stanford University (2019)
Katherine worked with the Houck group through the QURIP program (joint quantum research program between Princeton and IBM). Her work in the lab included (1) simulating magnetic lattices, (2) exploring different theoretical approaches to calculating hopping rates, and (3) investigating interesting properties/patterns in lattice band structures,
Andrei Vrajitoarea
Andrei joined the HouckLab in 2015 after finishing his undergraduate studies at University College London. His work has been focused on engineering photon interactions for next generation qubits and quantum simulation platforms. Currently, he is exploring transport in a multi-mode photonic crystal coupled to an artificial quantum impurity.
Joshua Wang
B.S. Physics, University of California, Irvine (2023)

Joshua is a first-year graduate student from Fremont, California who received his B.S. in Physics from the University of California, Irvine. In the Houck lab, he is working on developing superconducting circuits for exploring interesting physics through quantum simulation. Outside of research, Joshua also enjoys reading, exploring cities,…

Gengyan Zhang
Ph.D Electrical Engineering, Princeton University (2018)
M.S Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University (2011)
B.S Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University (2008)
Gengyan became a member of the Houck Lab in 2011 after receiving his bachelor's and master's degree from Tsinghua University. Known in the group as the fab machine.
Tony Zhu
B.S.E Electrical Engineering, Princeton University (2011)

Tony Zhu was an undergraduate in our group from 2010-2011. He worked on breaking time reveral symmetry in superconducting devices and, thankfully, didn't break much else. He is now a graduate student at MIT.