I am interested in both theoretical development and experimental implementations of quantum information protocols. On the theoretical side, my current research focuses on protocols that require only a small quantum processor, and thus may be implementable with current or near future technology, while in the past I have worked on strategies for discriminating optimally between quantum states - an important primitive in quantum information and communications. On the experimental side, I have collaborated with experimental groups, most recently with Kevin Resch's group at IQC, on optical demonstrations of quantum state discrimination strategies.
Together with collaborators Robin Blume-Kohout and Daniel Gottesman, my recent work has been to develop a streaming implementation of entanglement concentration - that is, one which reads in non-maximally entangled quantum systems one at a time, performs some processing, and outputs maximally entangled states as they are produced. This work also explores how a quantum processor learns about the quantum information input, and can use this information to improve performance in processing subsequent qubits. Unlike in the classical case, a quantum processor must do this coherently, and so stores "quantum knowledge" of the quantum state. My current research extends these ideas to state discrimination and quantum data compression.
In a previous life I was (briefly) a radio astronomer, studying quasars, among the brightest objects in the sky at all frequencies at which they have been observed. Some of my recent papers are in this field.