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. GOOGLE SCHOLAR