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Caltech
Volkan Gurses

Biography

Volkan is a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He works in the Caltech Holistic Integrated Circuits (CHIC) Lab advised by Prof. Ali Hajimiri and the Quantum Photonics and Artificial Intelligence (QPAI) Lab advised by Prof. Dirk Englund. He is also a visiting researcher at NVIDIA Research advised by Prof. Bill Dally. His research studies the fundamental physical and information-theoretic limits of technologies (e.g. Landauer, Bekenstein, Holevo limits) and build technologies (integrated circuits) that operate at those limits.

To that end, he invented various technologies that push current devices to these limits by leveraging concepts from fundamental physics. One example is quantum phased arrays that demonstrated the first free-space sensor and transceiver that can operate at the Heisenberg limit (overcoming the standard quantum limit) using quantum light and the first free-space interface for quantum information. He also invented quantum coherent transceivers that can operate at the Holevo limit (overcoming the Shannon limit) and put together a roadmap to couple these transceivers with efficient processors to push computing to the Landauer limit.

He was a recipient of 20 honors and awards, among which are the Carver Mead New Adventures Fund, Broadcom Innovation Fund, Caltech Entrepreneurship Prize, R. David Middlebrook Fellowship, Tau Beta Pi Fellowship, Roger P. Webb ECE Undergraduate Research Award, IEEE MTT-S Undergraduate/Pre-Graduate Scholarship, European Union Contest for Young Scientists CERN Special Donated Prize, and First Prize in Physics in the Turkish National Research Projects Contest. He has been a reviewer for Nature, Optica, and various IEEE journals. He is a member of the IEEE, APS, Optica, SPIE, IEEE-HKN, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Xi.

Education

  • Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, 2026.
  • M.S. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, 2022.
  • B.S. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States, 2020.