Saikat Guha is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences, starting July 2017, and the director of the NSF Center for Quantum Networks (CQN). Saikat received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1998, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 and 2008, respectively. From 2008 to 2017, he worked for Raytheon BBN Technologies, where in his most recent role as Lead Scientist, he led various sponsored projects funded by DARPA, ONR, NSF, DoE, and ARL, in topics surrounding quantum enhanced photonic information processing. He was one of the founding members of the Quantum Information Processing group at BBN, formed in 2009.
Saikat’s research interests are in the quantum limits of optical communications and quantum-secured communications (rate) and optical sensing (resolution)—both in the evaluations of these fundamental limits using tools from quantum information and estimation theory, as well as in the associated circuit synthesis problem, that of trying to piece together familiar classical and non-classical optical building blocks to realize transmitters and receivers needed to attain those limits. He is interested in the design of quantum repeaters for long-distance entanglement distribution. He has also been lately interested in continuous variable photonic quantum computing, and quantum networks.
Saikat received the Raytheon 2011 Excellence in Engineering and Technology Award, Raytheon’s highest technical honor, for work his team did on the DARPA-funded Information in a Photon program. He was a co-recipient of an honorable mention in NSA’s 2016 Cybersecurity Best Paper Award for a paper on Quantum-Secure Covert Communication on Bosonic Channels, which he supervised. He was a recipient of Anita Jones Entrepreneurial Award 2013 from BBN Technologies, a co-recipient of a NASA Tech Brief Award for his work on Phase-conjugate receiver for Gaussian-state quantum illumination, and received the Raymie Stata Award for outstanding performance as Teaching Assistant for Signals and Systems, Fall 2005, from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT. Saikat was a member of India’s first team to the International Physics Olympiad at Reykjavik in 1998, where he received an Honorable Mention and the European Physical Society (EPS) Award for the experimental component. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. Prof. Guha also has appointments with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Program in Applied Mathematics at the University of Arizona. In 2020, Saikat and his team were awarded an NSF Engineering Research Center. The center focus is on Quantum Networks (CQN).
