Prizes – BBQ Lab

Congratulations Suraj!

April 15, 2024April 25, 2024 sophiengineer

A congratulations is in order for our group member Suraj Goel!

Suraj gave talks at the SPIE Photonics Europe and SPIE Optical Systems Design 2024 conferences in Strasbourg, presenting our work on reconfigurable quantum optical circuits, and multi-plane neural networks at each conference respectively.

He won the best paper award (2^nd Place) at computational optics session for his talk on “Characterization of scattering systems using multi-plane neural networks“. We are very proud of him and the only thing left to ask is what will he spend his prize money on!?

Congratulations Mehul! Blavatnik Awardee

February 29, 2024March 11, 2024 willmccutcheon

We are very proud to see our Prof. Mehul Malik recognised at the prestigious Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists! Mehul has been named a 2024 Finalist in the Physical Sciences & Engineering category in the UK. He did it again!
Find out more in this beautiful short film capturing a (candid) day at BBQLabs with Mehul and the rest of the team.

Star-struck physicists in action

It is the first time Heriot-Watt University has been honoured in the awards, which recognise outstanding scientific talent and research that is transforming medicine, technology and our understanding of the world across three categories: Chemical Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering and Life Sciences.

For more info checkout
https://www.hw.ac.uk/news/articles/2024/heriot-watt-quantum-physicist-professor.htm

Natalia wins top Uni Prize!

December 4, 2023February 4, 2024 vatshal7885

We are thrilled to announce that our stellar postdoc, Dr. Natalia Herrera Valencia, has won Heriot-Watt University’s top research prize for her groundbreaking PhD dissertation on high-dimensional entanglement. This recognition is another jewel in her crown, a testament to Natalia’s contributions to the field of quantum information and communication.

Her remarkable journey is marked by an impressive collection of 10 published papers, including three highly cited first-author publications. These contributions have garnered over 500 citations to date, showcasing her exceptional impact at this early stage in her career.

Natalia’s thesis includes the demonstration of the unprecedented transport of quantum entanglement through a complex medium—a result that was featured on the cover of Nature Physics. It also caught the eye of the global media, including outlets such as BBC News. Congrats Natalia!

Our own Chair in Emerging Technologies

December 1, 2022August 21, 2023 nataliahv

Mehul continues his award-winning streak! Through the Chair in Emerging Technologies programme, the Royal Academy of Engineering has recognised Mehul as a visionary and world-leading researcher that will harness the spatial and temporal structure of light to develop an emergent photonics platform for high-capacity quantum networks that operate in a noisy, real-world environment.

Mehul is one of only four academics in the UK to receive this £2.5 million award over a period of up to 10 years, which enables a sustained and strategic focus on advancing emerging technologies with high potential to deliver economic and social benefits. With support from project partners BT Group and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Mehul’s 10-year research programme aims to translate the fundamental advances developed in BBQ Lab into applications that will have a direct impact on our modern society.

Exciting things coming, stay tuned! Congratulations Mehul!

Who said group leaders don’t spend time in the lab?

And the 2022 Nobel Prize goes to…

October 5, 2022August 21, 2023 mehulmalik

John Clauser, Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect have won this year’s Nobel physics prize for their research on quantum entanglement

We would like to congratulate Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for winning the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics! The prize was awarded for “experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”—a very exciting development for our field!

A very special congratulations goes out to Professor Zeilinger, whom Mehul spent several years working with in Vienna, before moving to Edinburgh and starting the BBQ Lab. In recognition of the award, the Nature portfolio of journals has put together a beautiful collection of articles by the awardees and advances they have inspired. We are pretty chuffed to see four of our papers in there (two authored with Anton, and two from our group at Heriot-Watt)!