Dr. Ilia Khait has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto since 2018. He is now a CQIQC postdoctoral fellow working with Professor Dvira Segal. He earned a BSc in electrical engineering, a BSc in physics and a PhD in physics from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology which is located in the beautiful city of Haifa.

In his PhD thesis he worked on various topics in condensed matter physics. One of his achievements was the development of a method for calculating transport properties of strongly interacting bosons and fermions. In general, these are very hard problems with extremely limited tools available. Furthermore, these are often limited to specific regimes. He continues to develop these ideas.

Currently, he is working on incorporating state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to study quantum dynamics and quantum information. As machine learning evolves, it becomes useful in many fields. Apart from natural language processing, image recognition, finance and more, it became popular in physics as well. He believes that with proper modeling we can harness machine learning tools to help us solve problems which would otherwise be hard to solve.

Additionally, Dr. Khait is advising a quantum hardware startup company on solutions for quantum device scaling. One of the field’s biggest problems is increasing the capabilities of quantum computers. Right now, these are very fancy huge science toys, which are extremely limited and do not allow game-changing computations. The technology they develop would allow interconnecting quantum computers, hence allowing near-term quantum devices to grow.

In his spare time, he enjoys exploring nature with his family (see photo below). "Canada in general, and Ontario in particular, have an abundance of beautiful scenery all year long!" he says. He tries to take photographs everywhere he goes and he used to maintain a personal photo gallery (which he says has not been updated in a while). Ilia is also a fan of team sports and used to be a water polo player, he still dreams about his comeback.