Curriculum vitae
A condensed view of my academic trajectory — grants and projects, talks and research visits, education, teaching, supervision, and service. For papers see Publications; for current group members and alumni see Group.
Employment
-
2025/1 — present Associate Professor & group leader, Leiden Institute of Physics (LION), Leiden University, NL
-
2020/11 — 2024/12 Assistant Professor & group leader, Leiden University, NL — tenure-track; tenured 2023/4; promoted to Associate 2025/1
-
2019/2 — 2021/1 Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, DE — host: Prof. Dr. J. I. Cirac
-
2017/4 — 2019/1 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, DE
-
2016/9 — 2017/3 CELLEX-ICFO-MPQ Postdoctoral Researcher, MPQ, DE
-
2015/8 — 2016/8 Postdoctoral Researcher, ICFO — The Institute of Photonic Sciences, ES
-
2011/9 — 2015/7 Ph.D. student, ICFO, ES
-
2010/6 — 2010/9 Summer fellow, ICFO, ES
Detailed version (with Leiden / MPQ / AvH / Marie Curie / ICFO logos and full descriptions) in the Activities archive.
Awards & fellowships
Prizes, scholarships and competitive fellowships, in reverse chronological order.
- 2022 Heineken Young Scientist Award — Natural Sciences (KNAW)
- 2022 Young Scientist Prize — AMOP Division, European Physical Society (includes plenary talk at ECAMP XIV)
- 2021 Google Research Scholar Award
- 2016 — 2020 Major competitive international fellowships — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (2017, score 9.76/10 — ranked 2nd/773 in panel), Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship (2019), CELLEX-ICFO-MPQ Fellowship (2016)
- 2016 — 2017 Ph.D. thesis prizes — ICFO Ph.D. Thesis Award (2016), UPC Special Doctoral Award (2017, MPQ press release), Springer Theses Award (2017)
- 2015 — 2019 Other recognitions — IOP Trusted Reviewer (Institute of Physics, 2019), 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting (2015, Young Scientist nominated by ICREA)
Detailed version (with citations and KNAW / EPS / Google / Springer / ICFO / UPC visuals) in the Activities archive. Older recognitions are in Awards (earlier).
Competitive projects
Principal Investigator, Co-PI and coordinator roles in competitive funding.
-
2025 — 2028 Co-PI ALMANAQC — ALgorithms for MAny-body NoisY Approximate Quantum Computers · Quantum Without Borders / NWO-XL (EUR 4M)
-
2024 — 2033 Co-PI Quantum Limits — Probing the limits of the quantum world · NWO Summit grant, 10-year consortium (EUR 34.5M)
-
2022 — 2027 PI FINE-TEA-SQUAD — FIrst NEar-TErm ApplicationS of QUAntum Devices · ERC Starting Grant, Horizon Europe (EUR 1.5M)
-
2021 — 2022 PI RAGECLIQ — RAndomness GEneration with Certification via LImited Quantum devices · Google Research Scholar Award
-
2020 — 2023 Co-PI SuperQuLAN — Quantum Local Area Networks with Superconducting Qubits · FET Open, Horizon 2020
-
2019 — 2023 Co-PI BeyondC — Quantum Information Systems Beyond Classical Capabilities · SFB Special Research Programme, FWF (Austria)
-
2017 — 2019 Coordinator Q-ANNTENNA — Quantum Artificial Neural Networks with Tensor Network Algorithms · Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship
Detailed version (with logos and project descriptions) in the Activities archive. Pre-Leiden grant participation as researcher is in Projects (researcher role).
Selected invited talks
A curated shortlist. The full chronological list of every presentation since 2012 lives at Presentations. The pre-2015 archive (with photos and event programmes) is in the Activities archive.
-
2026/02 Colloquium Ulm University, Germany — A hierarchy of spectral gap certificates for frustration-free spin systems
-
2025/09 Invited QTech 2025, Budapest, Hungary — A hierarchy of spectral gap certificates for frustration-free spin systems
-
2025/07 Invited BeyondQubit, Trento, Italy — Three-outcome Bell inequalities for many-body systems beyond qubits
-
2025/04 Invited Quantum Limits kick-off, Delft, The Netherlands — Preparation and certification of highly-entangled multipartite quantum states (flagship NWO Summit consortium launch)
-
2024/11 Invited International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Quantum Optics, Hangzhou, China — Optimization and certification of the spectral gap
-
2024/06 Invited Quantum Information 2024, Seefeld in Tirol, Austria — Optimization and certification of the spectral gap
-
2024/03 Invited Theory meets Experiment, Nikhef, Amsterdam, The Netherlands — Nonlocality and entanglement in quantum information for high-energy physics
-
2022/06 Plenary ECAMP XIV, Vilnius, Lithuania — Nonlocality in multipartite quantum systems (plenary talk associated with the EPS Young Scientist Prize)
-
2018/06 Invited Machine Learning for Quantum Many-body Physics, MPI for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — Certificates of quantum many-body properties assisted by machine learning
-
2017/10 Invited Quantum Innovators in Science and Engineering, IQC Waterloo, Canada — Energy as a detector of nonlocality of many-body spin systems
Teaching
I am the lecturer of Applied Quantum Algorithms (MSc, Spring) at Leiden University, and have been since 2021. I am also a regular contributor to Computer Science for QIST and Information Theory for QIST (Leiden University and TU Delft, Autumn), to the Quantum Algorithms graduate course at LIACS, and to the undergraduate Building Blocks of Quantum Matter course at LION. For the up-to-date list of courses and invited lectures see the Teaching page. I obtained the BKO (Basis Kwalificatie Onderwijs) — the Dutch University Teaching Qualification — in 2023.
Teaching from before Leiden — UPC teaching-assistant stints, ICFO Theory Lectures (2015–2016), CiMs-CELLEX, the E2C3 “Joves i Ciència” programme, and substituting Norbert Schuch's graduate course at TUM — is preserved in the Activities archive.
Supervision
I am currently supervising 7 postdoctoral researchers and 11 PhD students in the aQa group at Leiden. Since arriving in 2020, I have also supervised 30+ M.Sc. and B.Sc. theses — the full list lives at Theses supervised.
For pre-Leiden supervision — including the PhD co-supervision of Albert Aloy López (ICFO, defended 2020 Cum Laude), and the mentoring of summer fellows — see the Activities archive. (The three MPQ-era M.Sc./B.Sc. supervisions with J. I. Cirac appear on the Theses page directly.)
Committees & service
Editor for Quantum — the open-access journal for quantum science, since 2021/08.
- Lorentz Workshop — Lorentz Center, Leiden · Nonlocality: Driver for Quantum Advantage? (2024)
- Lorentz Workshop — Lorentz Center, Leiden · Bridging the Gap between Classical & Quantum Simulation of Complex Systems (6–8 May 2024)
- Scientific board, Workshop on Superconducting Quantum Networks · Vienna, 2022
- 2026 · TQC (Sherbrooke) · QCTiP (Oxford) · QIP (Riga)
- 2025 · QCE25 IEEE Quantum Week (New Mexico) · NWO Veldhoven (Quantum PC) · NeurIPS ML4PS (San Diego)
- 2024 · YQIS (Paris) · NeurIPS ML4PS (Vancouver) · CTP Quantum Information Days (Warsaw) · TQC (Okinawa) · QCTiP (Edinburgh) · ICT.OPEN (Utrecht) — Quantum track PC chair
- 2023 · NeurIPS ML4PS (New Orleans) · QIP (Ghent) · NWO Veldhoven (Quantum PC)
- 2022 · NeurIPS ML4PS · QPL (Oxford)
- 2021 · NeurIPS ML4PS (Vancouver) · QUATIC
- 2020 · CTP Quantum Information Days (Warsaw) · QUATIC (Faro)
- 2019 · Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting (Physics) — Poster session and Master Class
Also serves on admissions committees: ICFO FLIGHT Fellowship Programme (2024, 2025) and the QIST MSc Programme (2024–2026); panel work for NVAO (QIST) and LION visitatie.
-
2026/07 ChairBerta Casas i Font · Universitat de Barcelona
-
2026/05 MemberAlicja Dutkiewicz · Universiteit Leiden
-
2026/02 MemberFrancisco Escudero Gutiérrez · Universiteit Leiden — Quantum computing, norms and polynomials
-
2026 MemberAnubhav Srivastava · ICFO — The Institute of Photonic Sciences
-
2025/05 MemberSimon C. Marshall · Universiteit Leiden — Separating quantum and classical computing: rigorous proof and practical application
-
2025/03 MemberArash Ahmadi · TU Delft — Magic of fluctuations: from fluctuations in quantum information to magic resources
-
2025/02 MemberLieuwe Vinkhuijzen · Universiteit Leiden — Data structures for quantum circuit verification and how to compare them
-
2025/02 MemberDyon van Vreumingen · Universiteit van Amsterdam — Strategies for adiabatic state preparation of quantum many-body systems
-
2024/09 ChairMaría Balanzó-Juandó · ICFO — Certification in quantum information theory: key distribution, self-testing and entanglement
-
2024/04 MemberCasper Gyurik · Universiteit Leiden — Computational speedups and learning separations in quantum machine learning
-
2024/02 MemberStefano Polla · Universiteit Leiden — The power of one qubit in quantum simulation algorithms
-
2023/10 ReviewerIlya Kull · Universität Wien — Quantum information in many-body systems: analytical and numerical bounds on spatio-temporal correlations, parameter estimation, and the set of quantum marginals
-
2023/10 MemberAleksandar Bukva · Universiteit Leiden — Numerical exploration of statistical physics
-
2022/11 MemberXavier Bonet-Monroig · Universiteit Leiden — Optimization of quantum algorithms for near-term quantum computers
-
2021/12 SecretaryAdrián Pérez-Salinas · Universitat de Barcelona — Algorithmic strategies for seizing quantum computing
-
2019/02 Subst. memberBoris Bourdoncle · ICFO — Quantifying randomness from Bell nonlocality
-
2016/05 Subst. memberElsa Passaro · ICFO — Impact of imperfections on correlation-based quantum information protocols
Outreach
Recent outreach activities are covered in news coverage of the Heineken Young Scientist Award and the EPS Young Scientist Prize (2022), as well as engagement in The BIG Bell Test collaboration (Nature, 2018).
The full list of earlier outreach activities — including the Arbúcies al Món talk, EU-Büro Bayern MSCA workshop, MPA/MPE Open Day, and the IES Montsoriu inaugural lesson — is preserved in the Activities archive.
Education
-
2011 — 2015 Ph.D. in Photonics, ICFO — The Institute of Photonic Sciences (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) — Excellent cum laude
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Maciej Lewenstein & Prof. Dr. Remigiusz Augusiak · Thesis: Characterizing entanglement and quantum correlations constrained by symmetry -
2009 — 2011 M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Mathematics and Statistics (FME), UPC
-
2005 — 2011 Double B.Sc. in Mathematics and Telecommunication Engineering, CFIS — Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, UPC — intensive double-degree programme
Detailed version (with FME/ETSETB/ICFO logos and course breakdowns) in the Activities archive.
Languages
-
Catalan — Native. Level C1 -
Spanish — Native
-
English — Proficient (C2). Cambridge English: Advanced (CEFR Level C1; 2005)
-
German — Intermediate (B1, Intermediate level; 2019)
-
Dutch — Basic
-
Mandarin Chinese — Basic (HSK-2)
-
French — Basic
Programming languages and tools I work with are visualised in the Activities archive.
Other
Personal background — music education (Violin, EMVIC), pre-university schooling (IES Montsoriu, Col·legi Sant Josep), driving licence, programming-contest participation, and electoral-table service — lives in the Activities archive.