Maissam Barkeshli
Visiting Research Scientist, Meta Superintelligence Labs, Fundamental AI Research (FAIR)
email: maissam at umd dot edu
Maissam Barkeshli
email: maissam at umd dot edu
I am a theoretical physicist with a background in condensed matter physics, quantum field theory, and quantum information theory. In recent years I have also been working on AI, focused mainly on the science of deep learning.
I am a Principal Investigator in the Simons Collaboration on Physics of Learning and Neural Computation and a Senior Investigator in the Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation. I am also a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at UMD and an Affiliate Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS).
I received my PhD in Physics from MIT in 2010 under the supervision of Xiao-Gang Wen. From 2010 - 2013 I was a Simons postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where I worked with Steven Kivelson, Xiao-Liang Qi, and Sean Hartnoll. From 2013 - 2016 I was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Station Q in Santa Barbara, CA, where I worked with mathematicians and physicists: Michael Freedman, Zhenghan Wang, Kevin Walker, Chetan Nayak, Matthew Fisher, and Parsa Bonderson. In 2018 I received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
Before MIT, I received Bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics at UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate I developed models of quantum-limited SQUID amplifiers in the experimental group of Nobel Laureate John Clarke and I worked on the fundamental bounds on heat dissipation in computation.