Four New Scientists Join in First Half of 2021 to Advance Mission to Rethink Computation
Sunnyvale, Calif. – November 22, 2021 – NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), today announced that in the first eight months of 2021, its Physics & Informatics (PHI) Lab has gained six new scientists. These include Senior Research Scientists Adil Gangat and Sho Sugiura; Research Scientists Thibault Chervy, Edwin Ng, and Gautam Reddy; and Post-doctoral Fellow Yonghwi Kim. These additions bring the total number of PHI Lab scientists to 18, including PHI Lab Director Yoshihisa Yamamoto, generating further momentum to this group as NTT Research begins its third year of operations.
“This internal growth reflects well on the Lab’s foundational research into topics ranging from quantum physics to neuroscience and promotes our long-term mission of re-thinking and redesigning computers,” said NTT Research President and CEO Kazuhiro Gomi. “We believe these impressive new appointments will help bring us closer to that goal.”
Co-authors of a combined total of more than 100 academic papers, these six scientists bring to the PHI Lab a wealth of unique talent and expertise, as evident in the following brief bios:
- Adil Gangat: Dr. Gangat joined the NTT Research PHI Lab in February 2021 from the University of Queensland, where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 2014 under the supervision of Professor Gerard Milburn. Since then, he has held post-doctoral and visiting researcher positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Sherbrooke, National Taiwan University, University of Hannover, Free University of Berlin and University of Leeds. In the year prior to joining NTT Research, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems at the University of Queensland. His current areas of research include the design and application of tensor network algorithms.
- Sho Sugiura: Dr. Sugiura joined the NTT Research PHI Lab in April 2021. Over the previous three years, he was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) post-doctoral fellow for overseas research in the Department of Physics in Professor Eugene Demler’s group at Harvard University. Before that, he was a JSPS postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Solid State Physics in Professor Masaki Oshikawa’s group at the University of Tokyo. Dr. Sugiura received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 2015 from the University of Tokyo, where his advisor was Professor Akira Shimizu. Dr. Sugiura’s areas of research include quantum statistical inference, thermalization and many-body scar states.
- Thibault Chervy: Dr. Chervy joined the PHI Lab in August 2021 as a Research Scientist. He received his Ph.D. in Physics at the Institute of Supramolecular Science and Engineering (ISIS), a joint research unit of the University of Strasbourg and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Since then, he has been a Post-doctoral Researcher and a Visiting Scientist at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) Zürich in the lab of Dr. Prof. Atac Imamoglu. His research focuses on the behavior of light in complex, topological and interacting media.
- Edwin Ng: A Ph.D. candidate in applied physics at Stanford University, Ng has worked under the supervision of Professor Hideo Mabuchi at the Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory, using coherent control principles, dynamical systems theory and model reduction methods to study the information-processing potential of nascent quantum-optical hardware and architectures such as ultrafast nonlinear nanophotonics and coherent neuromorphic networks. He joined the PHI Lab as a research scientist in June 2021.
- Gautam Reddy: Dr. Reddy joined the PHI Lab as a Research Scientist in August 2021. He had been an Independent Post-doctoral Fellow at the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical & Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2019 from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Reddy works on the intersection of physics, reinforcement learning and neuroscience with a focus on the strategies that animals use to solve complex navigational tasks. His goal is to understand how artificial and biological agents process relevant information and learn to solve complex tasks from high-dimensional data. Previously, he has worked on how gliders optimally extract energy from atmospheric turbulent flows, how animals track odor trails and theoretical aspects of optimal sequential decision-making.
- Yonghwi Kim: Dr. Kim joined the NTT Research PHI Lab in June 2021 as a post-doctoral fellow, soon after receiving his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) under the supervision of Prof. Harry A. Atwater. His doctoral research, supported by a Kwanjeong Educational Foundation Fellowship, focused on tunable nanophotonic devices based on a phase transition material.
In addition to its 18 scientists, the PHI Lab has entered joint research agreements with nine academic research organizations, including those at University of Tokyo, Caltech, Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Notre Dame University, Stanford University, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Michigan and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. It is also conducting joint research with the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and 1QBit, a private quantum computing software company. Through these collaborations, the PHI Lab also has gained 21 research partners – quantum physicists, electrical engineers and neuroscientists who share the Lab’s vision of building a next-generation computing machine.
About NTT Research
NTT Research opened its offices in July 2019 as a new Silicon Valley startup to conduct basic research and advance technologies that promote positive change for humankind. Currently, three labs are housed at NTT Research facilities in Sunnyvale: the Physics and Informatics (PHI) Lab, the Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Lab, and the Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab. The organization aims to upgrade reality in three areas: 1) quantum information, neuroscience and photonics; 2) cryptographic and information security; and 3) medical and health informatics. NTT Research is part of NTT, a global technology and business solutions provider with an annual R&D budget of $3.6 billion.
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