Having graduated from Keble College, Oxford, I started working towards a PhD in Quantum Information in October 2003 at Clare College, Cambridge. Since submitting my thesis in May 2006, I have been working as a research fellow, also at Clare College. From April 2008 to March 2009, I visited the Max Plank Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching. I have previously lectured the Part-3 Mathematics course on Introduction to Quantum Computation. For historical purposes, you can find my lecture notes here.

Although a mild-mannered physicist by day, in my spare time I enjoy lots of adrenaline sports, including white water rafting, white water canoeing, white water swimming (basically anything with "white water" at the front is good), river bugging, canyoning, wakeboarding, skydiving, zorbing etc. On the calmer side of things, I also bake chocolate cakes, and enjoy photography. I also enjoy computer programming, and recently wrote a tool for embedding equations, as programmed by latex, into outlook.

I am interested in a variety of topics related to quantum computation. My PhD was concerned with two particular topics,

• Using fixed Hamiltonians, and no other control, to transfer and manipulate quantum states
• Achieving quantum computation with control of only global fields

In particular, the second approach should make physical implementations of quantum computation significantly simpler and more practical. Particular physical implementations that I have studied include optical lattices and arrays of coupled cavities (which are doped with atoms).

Since my PhD, the study of Hamiltonians has evolved into trying to describe natural problems for a quantum computer to solve - questions such as how hard is it to simulate the dynamics of Hamiltonian evolution, particularly when the Hamiltonian has a very restricted form such as translational invariance, and how hard is it to find the ground state of similar Hamitlonians. One might also hope that insight from this study will enable improved techniques for the classical simulation of these systems.

Further work that I'm involved in is related to error correction, fault tolerance, topological quantum computation (in particular, some of the links between these topics). The current thrust of this is to discover how robustly one can store quantum states without constant feedback processes such as error correction. I also have a research grant at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore to study the entanglement properties of multipartite entangled states.

I am currently organising a workshop in Cambridge on 6-7 September, 2010.