Highlighting his exceptional research in quantum computing, the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship has been awarded to Debanjan Konar, a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR). This fellowship, aimed at supporting early-career Indian researchers, offers the opportunity for a long-term stay at a top US university to strengthen their research skills. Debanjan was selected through a highly competitive process among applicants from a variety of scientific disciplines.
Starting in March 2023, the fellowship will fund Debanjan for the next two years as he pursues research at Purdue University (USA). His focus will be on quantum machine learning, a field in which quantum computing concepts are used to design more accurate and efficient machine learning algorithms. Specifically, Debanjan plans to leverage the inherent uncertainty in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, the current and upcoming generation of quantum computers, for stochastic-based modeling. He will test his proposed spiking quantum neural networks in various computer vision applications including noisy image recognition.
While staying in the United States, Debanjan will maintain his connection with CASUS as a guest scientist, allowing him to continue his work with the Matter under Extreme Conditions (MUEC) research group and utilize his quantum algorithms in the field of materials science. “I congratulate Debanjan for being awarded the prestigious Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship. Debanjan is a highly deserving recipient of this program, and I am confident that he will make the most of this opportunity,” says Dr. Attila Cangi, who leads the MUEC research group.
In addition to his fellowship, Debanjan is currently participating in the Helmholtz Information and Data Science Academy’s Helmholtz Information and Data Science Academy’s (HIDA) Trainee Network. This program aims to foster collaborations between Helmholtz centers by building a community of interdisciplinary data scientists. As a HIDA trainee, Debanjan is working with researchers at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing’s Department of Data Analytics, Access, and Applications at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Over the next months until March 2023, he plans to utilize the host center’s expertise in scalable data analytics to improve his quantum machine learning algorithms.