Current Members

Supratik Guha

Principal Investigator

Supratik Guha is Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago and holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory (2015 to present). He is one of the few scientists who has held senior executive positions in industrial R&D, in the U.S. National Laboratory system, and as a tenured professor at a leading research university. At Argonne, he has been Director of the Nanoscale Science and Technology Division and Science Advisor to the Director of Argonne. In this latter position he ran Argonne’s overall science strategy during 2018-2019. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at the Argonne led Q-NEXT: one of the five Department of Energy National Quantum Information Centers. His research interests are in the discovery science of new materials and devices for future information processing. Supratik was named a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2015 for his contributions to field effect transistor technology. He is also currently a Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Fellow.

From 2010 to 2015, Supratik was the Director of Physical Sciences at IBM Research, leading a team of over 250 researchers who were distributed across IBM’s worldwide laboratories and engaged in fundamental and applied science research. As a scientist, Guha initiated and then led IBM’s research in high dielectric constant (high-k)-metal gate transistor technology between 1998-2011. Today, the materials introduced by him can be found in the processors of the majority of smart phone products, as well as in IBM servers. While at IBM he championed IBM’s quantum computer on the cloud model, and was the first professional manager to put together a multidisciplinary engineering team for an integrated design of a quantum processor. As a manager he was also responsible for initiating and overseeing IBM’s silicon photonics and IoT based geospatial technology research activities, both of which led to successful product impact.

After joining the University of Chicago and Argonne, he drove Argonne's strategy in quantum information sciences and helped expand the program to where it is now one of Argonne's key strategic initiatives. He has also played an active role in championing national quantum information strategy and testified in front of Senate and Congressional sub-committees: these hearings played a role in the formation of DOE’s National Quantum Information Centers. His own research efforts are in the areas of quantum information technologies and in geospatial sensor networks and sensors for agriculture and water: topics apparently disparate, but both related to future information processing systems. In quantum, the efforts of his research group are in discovering new materials, devices, and atom scale nanofabrication processes for silicon compatible chip scale, integrated solid state quantum memories. He is co-PI of the Materials and Integration Thrust within Q-NEXT in this regard. His work on geospatial sensing systems includes the development and pilot scale evaluation of fully buried wireless underground sensor networks/sensors for agriculture; and mobile sensing platform-based mapping of water quality in rivers (thoreau.uchicago.edu). He is a co-PI at AIFARMS, the first national center for artificial intelligence applications for agriculture (USDA and NSF). A strong champion for multidisciplinary engineering research, which he believes academia needs to strongly engage in, Supratik works closely with electrical engineers, soil scientists, agronomists, computer scientists, economists and physical scientists on his various research activities.

Supratik received his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Southern California in 1991, and his B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (India) in 1985. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society. He was awarded the IBM Corporate Award in 2013 (IBM’s highest technical award) by IBM’s CEO. He received the American Physical Society (APS) 2015 Prize for the Industrial Applications of Physics. His recent research has been funded by the DOE, DoD (ONR), NSF, USDA, and the Tata Center for Development.

Dr. Gregory Grant

Post Doctoral Researcher

Gregory graduated from the University of Chicago College as a Physics major in June 2018. He subsequently joined the Guha Group as a PhD candidiate at the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. His interests lie in solid-state quantum memory and wireless sensor network technologies.

Dr. Koichi Tanaka

Post Doctoral Researcher

Koichi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Koichi received his PhD from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2020 for his work on growing transition metal carbide thin films on 2D materials. Before UCLA, he worked at Mitsubishi Materials Corporation in Japan. Koichi's current research interests include thin film growth, heterolayered and multilayered materials, materials characterization, and instrumentation of high and ultra-high vacuum systems.

Dr. Srinivasa Balivada

Post Doctoral Researcher

Srinivas contributes to the Thoreau's soil sensing project, and is currently assisting the development and testing of high-performance low-cost wireless underground sensor networking systems and estimation of soil characteristics using radio signal strength. Srinivasa earned his PhD at Andhra University in India before joining the Water-to-Cloud initiative as a research lead. He then joined UChicago as a postdoc and Argonne National Lab as a resident scientist, where he now studies soil sensing and quality monitoring.

Xella Doi

Graduate Student

Xella graduated from Cornell University in 2019 with a B.S. in Engineering Physics. In 2020, she started at the University of Chicago as a PhD candidate at the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering.

Connor Horn

Graduate Student

Connor joined the Guha group in 2020 as a PhD student in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. He previously completed a B.S. degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell University. His primary research interest is in the layer transfer and heterogeneous integration of crystalline materials for electronics and quantum engineering.

Sagar Kumar Seth

Graduate Student

Sagar graduated from IIT Bombay with a Bachelor's in Engineering Physics and a Masters in Nanotechnology. In 2021, he started his studies as a PhD candidate at the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

Ignas Masiulionis

Graduate Student

Ignas graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 2021 with bachelor's degrees in Physics and Astronomy. In 2021, he joined the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering cohort as a PhD candidate in Quantum Engineering. He is jointly advised by Professor Supratik Guha and Professor David Awschalom.

Claire McDermott

Graduate Student

Claire graduated from the University of Michigan in 2023 with a BSE in Engineering Physics and Computer Science and subsequently joined the Guha Group as a PhD candidate in the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

Jialun Ge

Graduate Student

Jialun graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in Physics. In 2024 he joined the Guha group as a PhD student in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Outside the lab he is an enthusiastic homecook and a casual video gamer.

Eeshan Ketkar

Graduate Student

Eeshan joined UChicago in 2024 as a graduate student pursuing his PhD in Quantum Science and Engineering.

Yizhi Zhao

Graduate Student

Yizhi graduated from the University of Chicago in 2025 and joined the Guha group as a graduate student working on chip scale quantum technologies.

Vidya Suri

Undergraduate Student

Vidya Suri is an undergraduate at UChicago majoring in Physics and Classical Studies. She is currently working on the direct-write project with Xella. Her interests are wide-ranging and include neutrino oscillations, quantum information, and nanofabrication.

Pravan Chakravarthy

Undergraduate Student

Pravan is a current undergraduate (class of 2025) at UChicago, majoring in physics and linguistics. He is currently working with Connor on applying a controlled spalling method to diamond films. His additional research interests lie in magnetic materials, as well as the applications of machine learning in materials science.
Collaborators

Dr. Jiefei Zhang

Jiefei is a staff scientist at Argonne National Lab. She is a quantum optics experimentalist and is expert at optical spectroscopy and quantum optical tomography. Her interest and focus include studying entanglement (photon and spin-photon entanglement), quantum decoherence, and developing new spin qubits and integrated hybrid photonic structures for applications in quantum sensing, quantum communication and quantum networks.

Dr. Swarnabha Chattaraj

Swarnabha is a postdoctoral researcher in the Galli Group studying electronic structure calculations, light-matter interaction of rare earth emitters, and defects in solids for classical and quantum memory applications, quantum networks, and quantum computation.

memQ

memQ is a quantum internet startup founded in part by lab alumnus Manish Singh.

Dr. Oni Basu

Oni is a professor of genetic medicine and the head of the Basu Group at the University of Chicago, studying microfluidics and RNA sequencing.

Dr. David Awschalom

David is a professor of molecular engineering and the head of the Awschalom Group at the University of Chicago studying solid-state quantum information, sensing, and communication.

Dr. Giulia Galli

Giulia is a professor of molecular engineering and the head of the Galli Group at the University of Chicago, studying the development of theoretical and computational methods in materials science

Dr. Alan Dibos

Alan is a scientist at Argonne National Lab specializing in nanofabrication and cryogenic measurement of low-dimensional optical nanostructures.

Dr. Subramanian Sankaranarayanan

Subramanian is a scientist at Argonne National Lab studying machine learning, multiscale modeling, and molecular dynamics.

Dr. Suman Datta

Suman is a professor of nanotechnology at Notre Dame and head of the NDC lab, studying a variety of advances in computing.

Dr. Roser Matamala

Roser is a scientist at Argonne National Lab studying terrestrial ecology, and is the head of the Matamala Group.

Dr. Jianguo Wen

Jianguo is a scientist at Argonne National Lab studying the development and application of electron microscopy techniques for materials science problems.

Dr. Anand Raghunathan

Anand is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, Associate Director of the SRC/DARPA Center for Brain-inspired Computing, and Co-Director of the Center for a Secure Microelectronics Ecosystem.

Dr. Kaushik Roy

Kaushik is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University studying AI algorithms and hardware, neuromorphic computing, low-power electronics, neuro-mimetic devices, and design-technology/ system-technology co-design.

Dr. Daniel Durhan

Dan is a staff scientist at Argonne National Lab.

Dr. Wilfried Haensch

Argonne National Lab
Alumni

Dr. Cheng Ji

Graduate Student

Cheng now works at Intel.

Dr. Daniel Durham

Post Doctoral Researcher

Dan is now a staff scientist at Argonne.

Dr. Brian Khau

Post Doctoral Researcher

Brian now works at Intel.

Dr. Alexandria Kuhl

Post Doctoral Researcher

Alex now works as a postdoc at Michigan State continuing her research in hydrogeophysical sciences.

Dr. Manish Kumar Singh

Graduate Student

Manish has founded memQ with Sean Sullivan, a startup focused on quantum internet technologies.

Dr. Kathryn Sautter

Post Doctoral Researcher

Katie now works at IQE in North Carolina.

Dr. Vamsi Nittala

Staff Scientist

Vamsi now works at Micron Technology in Boise, Idaho.

Dr. Niazul Khan

Post Doctoral Researcher

Niazul now works at Intel.

Dr. Suryakant Mishra

Post Doctoral Researcher

Suryakant now works at Los Alamos National Lab.

Dr. Jiyuan Zheng

Post Doctoral Researcher

Jiyuan now works at Tsinghua University in China.

Dr. Kyaw Zin Latt

Post Doctoral Researcher

Kyaw Zin now works at Argonne National Laboratory

Dr. Sanjoy Sarkar

Post Doctoral Researcher

Sanjoy now works at Intel.

Dr. Zhongbo Zhang

Post Doctoral Researcher

Zhongbo now works at Applied Materials.

Dr. Abhiteja Konda

Post Doctoral Researcher

Abhiteja now works at Micron Tech.

Dr. Abhinav Prakash

Post Doctoral Researcher

Abhinav now works at Lam Research.

Dr. Bhaswar Chakrabarti

Post Doctoral Researcher

Bhaswar is now an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

Dr. Xufeng Zhang

Post Doctoral Researcher

Xufeng is now an assistant professor at Northeastern University.

Dr. Khan Alam

Post Doctoral Researcher

Khan now works as an assistant professor in the department of physics at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Jerome Lin

Post Doctoral Researcher

Jerome is now manager of the device group at TSMC.

Dr. Sushant Sonde

Post Doctoral Researcher

Sonia Vohra

Graduate Student

Sonia now works at the engineering co-op Phoenix Tailings in Boston.
Thoreau Project Alumni

Priyank Hirani

Program Director

Priyank is now the Data & Tech Lead at the Asia Regional Office of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Himank Sharma

Project Lead

Himank continued on to pursue an MBA at Berkeley-Haas.

Ritambhara Chauhan

Tech Lead

Dr. Anand Kumar

Water Research Lead

Anand is currently searching for new postdoctoral or university positions.

Saba Mundlay

Data Analyst

Saba is currently working on her MA in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art, London.

Dr. Nutan Maurya

Anthropologist

Prashant Pandey

Project Consultant

Prashant is currently pursuing Ph.D. and industry opportunities.
Undergraduate Alumni

Chloe Isabella Tsang: Chloe is pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern California.

Rishi Chebrolu: Rishi is pursuing a PhD at Duke University.

Brian Fu

Antoni Wellisz: Antoni is pursuing a PhD at the University of Hcicago

Adrian Portales: Adrian now works as a research intern at HRL Laboratories/Harvard.

Linus Woodward: Linus has continued on to pursue a PhD at Stanford.

Emilio Rosas

Marianna Rogers

Ziqi Ma: Ziqi has continued on to pursue a PhD at Caltech.

Daniel Montano

Arseniy Andreyev: Arseniy is now pursuing a PhD at Princeton University.

William Kent: Will has continued on to pursue a PhD in materials science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Jacob Gold

Dmitry Shribak

Ujaan Purakayastha: Ujaan is now pursuing a PhD at UIUC.