Alexandru (Andru) Gheorghiu

 

I am a Staff Research Scientist at IBM Quantum. Before that I was an Assistant Professor at Chalmers University of Technology in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, a Junior Research Fellow at the ETH Institute for Theoretical Studies and a postdoc at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech, working under the supervision of Thomas Vidick. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science in 2018 from the University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Elham Kashefi.

Email: andru at agheorghiu dot com

Research Interests

My research is broadly in the area of quantum computation and quantum cryptography. Specifically, I work on quantum verification (designing protocols for efficiently verifying quantum computations), proofs of quantumness (designing protocols for efficiently certifying quantum advantage) and quantum complexity theory (understanding the potential and limitations of efficient quantum computation).

Teaching and Talks

In March 2023, I taught a PhD course at Chalmers University titled Quantum Computing: Algorithms and Complexity. This course introduced the basics of quantum computation, with a focus on algorithmic capabilities and complexity. The first half of the course covered how quantum computation works (at an abstract level) and how it can be used to design efficient algorithms. The second half covered mostly research-level topics, at the forefront of our understanding about quantum computing. The course website is here.

In April 2020, I taught a special topics course on Quantum Algorithms and Programming at Caltech. The goal of the course was to teach the fundamentals of quantum computation through a combination of theory and programming in quantum programming languages. The material used in the course can be found here.

I was a teaching assistant within the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh for: Introduction to Quantum Computing, Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science, Algorithms and Data Structures, Computation and Logic, Object-Oriented Programming.

I have organized three workshops on the basics of quantum computation and cryptography at the Politehnica University of Bucharest. The latest edition of the workshop (from 2018) can be found here.

You can find some of my talks here:

Selected Papers

The full list of my publications and preprints can be found on Google Scholar. Below is a list of selected papers that are representative of my work.