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Organizing Committee Biographies

Taekjip “TJ” Ha (NAS), Chair, is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He develops and uses single-molecule and single-cell measurement tools to study life at high resolution. Dr. Ha received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Seoul National University in 1990 and a doctoral degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1996. After postdoctoral training at Stanford University, he was a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2015. Dr. Ha serves on the editorial boards for Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He received the 2011 HoAm Prize in Science.

Clarice D. Aiello is a Brazilian quantum engineer, the leader of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Quantum Biology Tech Lab, and interested in how quantum physics informs biology at the nanoscale. She holds a Diplôme d’Ingénieur from the École Polytechnique (France), a physics M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge (UK), and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in electrical engineering. Prior to joining UCLA, Dr. Aiello held postdoctoral appointments in bioengineering at Stanford University and in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Throughout her career, she has received fellowships and awards from institutions such as the Moore Foundation, the Schlumberger Foundation, Fulbright, UNESCO, and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Dr. Aiello was also recognized by MIT’s School of Engineering’s Award for Extraordinary Teaching and Mentoring. She is actively engaged in fostering the quantum biology field as organizer of an international series of trainee-focused weekly talks about quantum biology and also as the chair or keynote speaker in venues such as the National Science Foundation Nanoscale Science and Engineering Grantees Conference (2019); the Australian and New Zealand Conferences on Optics and Photonics (2019); the IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (2019); MindshareLA (2020); HRL Laboratories (2020); and the 2020 American Physical Society March Meeting.

Prem Kumar is a professor of information technology in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Although Dr.

Kumar’s primary appointment is in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a courtesy appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy allows him to recruit students from both disciplines into his research group, a privilege that has proven extremely beneficial for his research interests that lie at the interface of basic quantum science and applied information technology. His primary research focus is on photonic devices and their applications utilizing the principles of nonlinear and quantum optics. Recent projects have included generation, distribution, and ultrafast processing of photonic entanglement for applications in quantum information networks; novel quantum light states for precision measurements, imaging, and sensing; and novel optical amplifiers and devices for networked classical optical communications. From February 2013 to January 2017, Dr. Kumar was on leave from Northwestern University to be at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he served as a program manager in the Defense Sciences Office. Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Kumar served on the National Academies’ committee that issued the 2012 landmark report Optics and Photonics: Essential Technologies for Our Nation, which spawned the National Photonics Initiative (NPI). Presently, Dr. Kumar serves on the NPI Steering Committee, lending his expertise to issues pertaining to the National Quantum Initiative. Dr. Kumar is a fellow of the Optical Society, the American Physical Society, IEEE, the Institute of Physics (UK), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers. He has been a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Photonics Society, a Hermann A. Haus Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a recipient of the Quantum Communication Award from Tamagawa University in Tokyo, Japan, and the Walder Research Excellence Award from the provost’s office at Northwestern University.

Philip Kurian is a theoretical physicist, a translational scientist, and the founding director of the Quantum Biology Laboratory (QBL) at Howard University. Dr. Kurian is the recipient of awards from the U.S.–Italy Fulbright Commission, the Oak Ridge and Argonne Leadership Computing Facilities, the Whole Genome Science Foundation, the National Physical Science Consortium, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He serves as the principal investigator (PI) for a federal study examining how optical pumping of aqueous proteins far from equilibrium can produce collective restructuring of their internal mechanical degrees of freedom, and as the co-PI for the conceptualization of a National Science Foundation “quantum leap” challenge institute to develop novel platforms for quantum sensing and information processing in complex biological environments. His QBL was the first group outside the United Kingdom to receive a grant from the Guy Foundation, which was established in 2018 to facilitate exploration into quantum biology and the role it could play in

advancing medicine globally. Dr. Kurian’s vision is to uncover how fundamentally quantum interactions can produce biological manifestations at the mesoscopic and clinical scales, including in neurodegeneration, cancer, immunodiversity, oxidative metabolism, and human consciousness. As a board member for the Science for Seminaries program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Kurian also advises seminary professors on how to integrate frontier science topics into theological conversations. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Howard University.

Prineha Narang is an assistant professor at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty, she came to Harvard University as a Ziff Fellow and worked as a research scholar in condensed matter theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Physics. Dr. Narang received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology. Her work has been recognized by many awards and special designations, including a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2020, being named a Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review, and a Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum in 2018. In 2017, Dr. Narang was named by Forbes magazine on its “30 under 30” list for her work in quantum engineering. Dr. Narang’s lab’s research at Harvard University focuses on how quantum systems behave, particularly away from equilibrium, and how these effects can be harnessed. By creating predictive theoretical and computational approaches to study dynamics, decoherence, and correlations in matter, Dr. Narang’s lab’s work would enable technologies that are inherently more powerful than their classical counterparts, ranging from scalable quantum information processing to ultrahigh-efficiency optoelectronic and energy conversion systems.

Jennifer Pett-Ridge is a senior staff scientist and the group leader at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) who uses the tools of systems biology and biogeochemistry to link, identity, and function in environmental microbial communities. Recently awarded a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career award to study the responses of tropical soil microbes to climate change, she has also pioneered the use of NanoSIMS isotopic imaging in the fields of microbial biology and soil biogeochemistry. As the lead scientist of the LLNL Genomic Science Program Biofuels Scientific Focus Area (SFA) from 2009 to 2018 and more recently the LLNL Soil Microbiome SFA, Dr. Pett-Ridge helps to coordinate multidisciplinary teams that integrate biogeochemistry, stable isotope probing, NanoSIMS imaging, molecular microbial ecology, and

computational modeling to understand biotic interactions and energy flow in microbial communities critical to the soil carbon cycle, nutrient cycling, and sustainable biofuel production. She is the group lead for the Environmental Isotope Systems group in the Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division at LLNL and manages a portfolio of more than $10 million in DOE, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other funding. Dr. Pett-Ridge helps to mentor a group of staff scientists, postdocs, and graduate students working on terrestrial and marine carbon cycling, plant–soil interactions, and the development of new isotope tracing methods (El-FISH, Chip-SIP, STXM-SIMS) and collaborates frequently with scientists at academic institutions and other national labs. She has published more than 85 peer-reviewed articles, including a return-on-investment patent for the ChipSIP approach linking microbial identity and function using NanoSIMS analysis of microarrays. Dr. Pett-Ridge was awarded a Ph.D. in soil microbial ecology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.S. in forest science and a B.A. in biology and studies in the environment from Yale University.

Jason B. West is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology at Texas A&M University. He is a plant physiological ecologist who studies the ecological and evolutionary causes of trait variation across a range of organizational and spatiotemporal scales as well as the ecosystem-scale impacts of that variation. He has worked in a number of ecological systems in North and South America and collaborates with colleagues around the world in many others. Dr. West is an internationally recognized expert in plant physiological ecology and spatial modeling of plant isotopes and seeks transdisciplinary solutions to difficult scientific questions. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and a B.S. from Utah State University, has held research positions at the University of Minnesota and The University of Utah, and was a visiting scientist at INRAE Nouvelle–Aquitaine-Bordeaux.