Chinmay Nirkhe

Biography

I am a faculty member in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and a member of the CS Theory and Quantum CS groups. Before UW, I was a research scientist with IBM Quantum. I received my Ph.D. from Berkeley and my B.S. from Caltech.

I am somewhere between a mathematician and a computer scientist. My research is at the intersection of complexity theory and quantum computation. In particular, I am interested in proving hardness-of-approximation results and lower bounds on the description complexity of quantum states.

Teaching

• Spring 2025 -- CSE 434: Introduction to Quantum Computation
• Autumn 2024 -- CSE 534: Quantum Information and Computation

Graduate Students

Assaf Harel.

If you are interested in being advised by me or collaborating with me, send me an email listing problems you are interested in and your background. I'm more interested in students who have demonstrated an ability to pick up new skills and have a desire to tackle big problems than a particular background in complexity theory or quantum computation.

Select Publications

• NLTS Hamiltonians from good quantum codes
  Anurag Anshu, Nikolas Breuckmann, and Chinmay Nirkhe.
  QIP 2023 (Plenary Talk). CCC 2023 (Invited Talk). STOC 2023.
  [arXiv:2206.13228] [News Article] [Simons Institute Blog Post] [Proceedings Version]
• A distribution testing oracle separation between QMA and QCMA
  Anand Natarajan and Chinmay Nirkhe.
  QIP 2024. CCC 2023. Quantum 2023.
  [arXiv:2210.15380] [Proceedings Version]
• Quantum search-to-decision and the state synthesis problem
  Sandy Irani, Anand Natarajan, Chinmay Nirkhe, Sujit Rao, and Henry Yuen.
  QIP 2022. CCC 2022.
  [arXiv:2111.02999] [Proceedings Version]
• On the complexity and verification of random circuit sampling
  Adam Bouland, Bill Fefferman, Chinmay Nirkhe, and Umesh Vazirani.
  Nature Physics 2018. ITCS 2019. QIP 2019.
  [arXiv:1803.04402] [Journal Version] [News Article]

Education and Past Employment

• IBM Quantum, Cambridge
  Research Staff Scientist. 2022 - 2024.
• University of California, Berkeley
  Ph.D. Computer Science. 2017 - 2022.
  Advisor: Umesh Vazirani | Thesis: Lower bounds on the complexity of quantum proofs
• California Institute of Technology
  B.S. Mathematics, B.S. Computer Science. 2013 - 2017.
  

Academic Service

Resources

• CSE Ph.D. application form
• Information on application fee waivers
• CSE's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access initiatives
• University mental health resources
• CSE advising resources for undergraduates

• Manuel Blum's advice to a beginning graduate student
• Sam Hopkins's advice on how to read a paper
• Boaz Barak's advice for a budding theorist

Contact Information