Anantha Rao

My name is Anantha (pronounced : An-an-tha, Kannada: ಅನಂತ). I am a first-year Ph.D. student at UMD Physics and QuICS. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Michael Gullans. I also closely work with Prof. Justyna Zwolak at NIST, Prof. M. S. Santhanam at IISER Pune and the IBM-Quantum Research team in India. I received my BS-MS Physics from IISER Pune. My pronouns are He/Him.

My research area is the intersection of Quantum Information and Condensed Matter Physics. My research aims to study many-body quantum systems, understand their behaviour, and harness their non-classical properties to build useful, scalable devices for practical applications. To this end, I employ and develop analytical, numerical and statistical approaches. Some of the projects I am currently working on are :

• Quantum algorithms with repeated measurements and Post-selection.
• One-dimensional many-body quantum systems in the presence of disorder.
• Automated autotuning approaches for quantum-dot devices.
• Quantum-enhanced machine learning and tensor-networks.

This website is a place where I share my interests, learnings and insights on various topics. A lot of things that I gain from my research do not end up being part of the final research paper that I write but I would be very happy to talk and learn from the research audience. I strongly believe in science being a collective and collaborative effort and I look forward to discussing ideas.

If you are interested in my CV (updated Nov 2023) here it is!

Recent Highlights

• Conducted a tutorial on learning electron configurations with machine learning at Brown AI Winter school (YT link).
• During my master’s thesis, I worked with IBM Research on developing new variational quantum algorithms for generative machine learning.
• At IISER Pune, I worked with Prof MS Santhanam on various problems related to quantum chaos, many-body localization, and quantum search algorithms.
• In 2021, I co-founded and led the software team of Curem Biotech, the first student-led startup at IISER Pune.
• An avid supporter of FOSS (Free and Open source software), I also write-code for various open source organizations (Julia, iGEM and ML4SCI)

Other interests

• Hackathons (quantum/classical), seminars on trends in academia+industry.
• Exploring new places🧭, photographing sights📷, trying diverse cuisines 🍱🍚 and learning about history are some of the hobbies that I pursue.
• Reading books 📚 (mostly non-fiction) and writing blog posts ✍️ about science are some of the ways that I learn and communicate.
• Playing the guitar 🎸 and hiking the western ghats 🥾⛰ are some of the activities that I enjoy.
• Gardening 🌳 is something that I’ve recently started but I’m not very good at it yet.

Pet projects

• QeVAE (2022 - present): A quantum-enhanced variational autoencoder
• QCompiler (2021 - present): A quantum compiler that executes quantum circuits and gates
• QuantChaos (2021 - present): A introductory set of tutorials and code on the quantum kicked rotor
• DelemaDetect (2020): Deep learning for Malaria detection
• PacMal (2020): Peptides against Cerebral malaria. (insilico modeling of peptide drugs)

Misc

• I like and use Goodreads for keeping track of reading lists.
• I used quora before but abandoned it after aggressive paywalls.