Saikat Guha is Clark Distinguished Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. Saikat is an Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, and an Affiliate Faculty of EECS at MIT. He is co-Director of the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC), Center for Quantum Networks (CQN), headquartered at the University of Arizona. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, Saikat was Peyghambarian Endowed Chair Professor of Optical Sciences, at the College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona. Saikat received his Bachelor of Technology (B. Tech.) degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur in 2002, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 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 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 core research interests lie at the intersection of quantum optics and information theory. His research involves exploring the fundamental performance and precision limits associated with optical communications, sensing and imaging, imposed by treating light as a quantum-mechanical object. Some specific research topics of current interest in his group include: using pre-detection quantum transformations of laser-light modulated codewords at the receiver for enhanced performance in deep-space communications in the photon starved regime, exploiting continuous-variable entanglement generated by squeezing photons across spatial and temporal modes of light for quantum enhanced near-field sensing applications, adaptive optical spatial mode sorting for attaining imaging resolution approaching the quantum limit, entanglement assisted long-baseline sensor and imaging arrays, and bosonic encodings, error correction codes and repeater architectures for entanglement distribution at short and long distance scales.
Saikat received the Raytheon 2011 Excellence in Engineering and Technology Award 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.