Hi!

The HMC Quantum Optics group (or Lynn Lab), led by Professor Theresa Lynn, investigates quantum communication protocols for polarization-entangled two photon systems. Our current work focuses on developing a two-step adaptive choice method for determining the entanglement of two photons via a linear optical apparatus.
Check out the Research and Projects page for more details on my contributions and see Professor Lynn's page for a more general overview of the group's work.

The Quantum Materials Lab was led by the late Professor AKM Newaz at SFSU. As an undergraduate researcher, I studied shifts in the Raman peaks of Molybdenum Disulfide when developed on gold substrate in ambient vs. glove box environments. Using Raman spectrometry and Python for data analysis, we confirmed differences in biaxial strain and doping between the two preparation situations, showing potential impacts for solar and biomedical applications. See the Research and Projects page for more details.

Material properties of a spring determine the proportionality between its restorative force and displacement. In the large strain limit, certain biological materials behave with growing stiffness; collaborator Charlie Schofield and I approximated this behavior using a second order correction term to Hooke's law. We then simulated a simplified biological system by putting massless, non-linear springs in series in between masses representing joints. Using Python and Mathematica, we evaluated the non-analytically solvable equations of motion to view chaotic behavior while varying spring constants, masses, and initial conditions. See the Research and Projects page for more details, or read the write up/code below.

Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) are a type of algorithm that map a hamiltonian to a quantum circuit to calculate the ground state energy of a system. VQEs are strong due to them using classical and quantum computers for their respective strengths--the first for optimization and the second for measuring the qubits in our quantum circuit.
I calculated the ground state energies of ammonia NH₃ in various configurations, demonstrating a symmetric dual minima potential (SDMP) between two states using Qiskit VQE implementations and the IBM Cloud Platform. Figure 1 includes results from both a noiseless and noisy quantum computer simulator. See the Research and Projects page or links below for a longer write up, results using IBM's quantum computer in Kyoto, an example calculation of H₂ ground state energy, and all code involved.

The COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) is a four day competition in which teams of three model a real world problem and write a paper on their work. For the 2025 contest, we built a physical and chemical simulation to model stair wear over time, providing archaeologists analyzing a historical set of stairs the tools to learn about the stair's traffic patterns. For force (human steps over time) we used a 2D Generalized Maxwell Model, and for chemical erosion from precipitation a set of linear polynomials fit from a Gaussian Mixture Model. See the Research and Projects page or links below for more info!