n 18.11.24 – Manuel Rudolph (Prof. Zoë Holmes’ lab), is honored to be the first EPFL Physics PhD student to receive the prestigious Google PhD Fellowship in quantum computing. This year, the award was granted to three candidates, a number that has varied between one and four in past years.
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The Google PhD Fellowship Program recognizes exceptional graduate students conducting innovative research in computer science and related fields. It supports promising PhD candidates from diverse backgrounds who aim to shape the future of technology. Google PhD Fellows are a select group, acknowledged by Google and their institutions as some of the most promising young researchers globally, representing the future of their fields.

Manuel’s research explores the potential applications of quantum computers, particularly for simulating quantum systems and machine learning. His current work investigates to what extent quantum algorithms can be efficiently simulated on conventional computers. While it’s widely believed that quantum computers will accelerate many algorithms, Manuel and his collaborators – from EPFL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Google – are demonstrating that their new simulation methods can often achieve similar efficiency. Through his research, Manuel seeks to contribute to our understanding of which tasks require quantum computing resources, and ultimately assist these machines with his high-performance simulation tools.

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