David Gosset
David Gosset is an Associate Professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization and a faculty member at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at theUniversity of Waterloo. He joined the University of Waterloo on 1 August 2018. He is also an Associate Faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Quantum Information Science programme. He can be reached atdgosset@uwaterloo.caand maintains an academic website at davidgosset.com.
Gosset completed his PhD in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 under the supervision of Edward Farhi. His doctoral research focused on quantum adiabatic algorithms and their power and limitations. This work led to his broader interest in the theory of quantum computing, quantum algorithms, and quantum complexity theory, with a strong connection between physics and computer science. He earned his undergraduate degree in combined honours Physics and Mathematics from theUniversity of British Columbia.
After completing his PhD, Gosset held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo and at theCalifornia Institute of Technology. He later joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 2016 as a Research Staff Member in the Theory of Quantum Computing and Information Group. He went on to manage the Theory of Quantum Algorithms group atIBM, where his research focused on fundamental questions in quantum algorithms and complexity theory, motivated by the development of near-term quantum computers.
Gosset’s research expertise includes quantum algorithms, classical simulation of quantum computation, and the computational complexity of quantum many-body systems. His work has contributed to areas such as quantum advantage with shallow circuits, classical simulation of quantum circuits, stabilizer rank methods, Hamiltonian complexity, and entanglement properties of quantum systems. He has published extensively in leading journals including Science, Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters, Communications in Mathematical Physics, and Quantum, as well as major conference proceedings such as STOC, FOCS, and TQC.
His awards and honours include being named a CIFAR Fellow, receiving multiple Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Awards at IBM Research, an Outstanding Paper Award at TQC 2019, the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellowship, an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship, and academic honours from bothMITand UBC. Through his academic and industrial roles, Gosset has played an important role in advancing the theoretical foundations of quantum computing.
