I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Physics at EPFL. I work at the intersection of quantum algorithms, coding theory, learning theory and many-body physics, with the long-term goal of understanding what quantum devices can provably do — both in their idealized, error-corrected forms, and in the noisy, near-term regime.
A recurring theme in my work is uncovering the decoding/learning structure in quantum primitives in order to derive fundamental limits and design algorithms: from Gibbs-state preparation and optimization, to cryptography and limitations of error mitigation.
I also use computational complexity as a lens on physics — thermalization, chaos, and randomness — asking what is classically simulable and what is (not) observable experimentally.
My name is pronounced 'Ee-huay Kwek' (see Trivia if, in addition to the pronunciation, you are also confused about its spelling).
Short bio:
2025-now: Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Physics at EPFL.
2022-2024: Postdoctoral triumvirate at FU Berlin, Harvard University and MIT, supported by the Harvard Quantum Initiative research fellowship and Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship, under the wonderful guidance of Aram Harrow, Peter Shor, Anurag Anshu, Susanne Yelin and Jens Eisert.
Jan '17-Jan '22: Ph.D from Stanford University (Supervisor: Tsachy Weissman)
Supported by the Stanford Q-FARM Fellowship, Stanford Graduate Fellowship and National University of Singapore (NUS) Overseas Graduate Scholarship.
Aug 12 - Jun 16: B.S. (Phi Beta Kappa) in Physics and Mathematics, MIT (Supervisor: Peter W. Shor)
Thanks to my senior thesis on quantum and super-quantum enhancements to capacities of interference channels, my Erdös number is 3!
[Dec 2025] I am very honored to give a 'Rising Star' talk at the FOCS 2025 Satellite Workshop, 'A Celebration of TCS'!
[Nov 2025] What does it mean to "condition" on part of a quantum state? Our new paper on the arXiv explores this in the deep thermalization paradigm: Design boosters: from constant-time quantum chaos to ∞-designs and beyond. Thank you to Soumik Ghosh, Arjun Mirani and Michelle Xu for the collaboration!
[Nov 2025] Learning Stabilizers with Noise has been accepted to ITCS 2026!
[Nov 2025] I am fortunate to have had three papers accepted as contributed talks to QIP 2026: Hamiltonian Decoded Quantum Interferometry, Information-Computation gaps in Quantum Learning via low-degree likelihood, and Learning Stabilizers with Noise, merged with its followup Average-Case Complexity of Quantum Stabilizer Decoding.
[Nov 2025] Our paper on non-unital noise has been accepted to Nature Physics.
[Oct 2025] I attended the KITP Program 'Learning the Fine Structure of Quantum Dynamics in Programmable Quantum Matter', where I led a discussion on pseudorandomness in condensed matter.
[Oct 2025] I gave five invited talks: at the conference 'Frontiers of Programmable Quantum Dynamics: Advances and Applications' at KITP, EQUIPTNT Workshop in Munich, Columbia University, at the IQIM Seminar at Caltech and at the QTech conference organized by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
[Oct 2025] I am delighted to serve on the QIP Program Committee for the third time!
[Oct 2025] Two new papers on the arXiv: Hamiltonian Decoded Quantum Interferometry and Quantum advantage from random geometrically-two-local Hamiltonian dynamics. The first paper is a generalization of the DQI algorithm to quantum (i.e. Hamiltonian) optimization problems and Gibbs Sampling; the second paper is a proposal for quantum advantage via running Hamiltonian time dynamics for constant time. It has been an absolute privilege to collaborate with Sascha Schmidhuber, Jonathan Lu, Noah Shutty, Stephen Jordan and Alex Poremba on the former paper :)
[July 2025] I gave a talk at TQC 2025 on pseudochaos.
[July 2025] I gave a talk at WERQSHOP, the Workshop on Error Resilience in Quantum computing, organized by the Unitary Foundation. This meaningful workshop brought together academics with industry practitioners to really hash out the challenges in quantum error mitigation and error-resilient compilation. The findings from this workshop have been summarized into a White Paper.
[Jun 2025] Our paper, Information-Computation gaps in Quantum Learning via low-degree likelihood, is on arXiv. Thanks to Sitan Chen, Weiyuan Gong and Jonas Haferkamp for a great collaboration.
[Mar 2025] I gave invited talks on pseudochaos at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics Seminar, the Simons Institute Quantum Pod and the MIT QI group meeting.
[Apr 2025] Our paper, Simulating quantum chaos without chaos, has been selected as a contributed talk at TQC 2025.
[Jan 2025] Our paper, Learning quantum states and Unitaries of bounded gate complexity, has been featured on the cover of PRX Quantum!
Here's a link to Olds (i.e. News pre-2025).