Umesh Virkumar Vazirani

Umesh V. Vazirani is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as Director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center (BQIC). His academic journey began with a BS from MIT in 1981, followed by a PhD from UC Berkeley in 1986 under the supervision of Manuel Blum. With over three decades of contributions to theoretical computer science, Professor Vazirani has established himself as one of the founders of quantum computing.

His research interests span multiple areas within theoretical computer science with a primary focus on quantum computing. Professor Vazirani's work encompasses quantum complexity theory, quantum algorithms, quantum information, computational complexity, and connections between quantum computation and other fields such as cryptography, game theory, and quantum gravity. His research has evolved from foundational work on quantum Turing machines and quantum complexity classes to contemporary investigations of quantum supremacy, verifiable quantum advantage, and certifiable randomness.

Professor Vazirani has received numerous prestigious recognitions for his work, including:

• Election to the National Academy of Sciences (2018)
• Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in discrete mathematics (2012)
• ACM Fellow for contributions to theoretical computer science and quantum computation (2005)

As an advisor, Professor Vazirani has mentored numerous successful students who have gone on to prominent positions in academia and industry. His current advisees include Jonah Sherman, Guoming Wang, Anupam Prakash, Urmila Mahadev, and Seung Woo Shin. His former students include notable researchers such as Scott Aaronson (MIT), Madhu Sudan (Harvard), Sanjeev Arora (Princeton), and Andris Ambainis (University of Latvia). His research has been consistently funded through various grants supporting quantum computing research, allowing him to maintain an active research group exploring fundamental questions in quantum information science.

Professor Vazirani leads the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center, which serves as a hub for quantum information research at UC Berkeley, fostering collaboration between computer scientists, physicists, and engineers working on quantum technologies. The center supports research in quantum algorithms, quantum complexity, quantum error correction, and the theoretical foundations of quantum computing.