Three Texas ECE faculty, Poulami Das, Linran Fan, and Shyam Shankar, have been selected to receive a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award is the most prestigious offered by NSF’s CAREER Program, providing up to five years of funding to junior faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of their organizations’ missions.

Das received the award for work on " Co-Designing Compilers and Architectures For High-Performance And Scalable Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing." The project aims to build automated and optimized program compilation methods, advance qubit control architectures to tackle inefficiencies in real-time instruction scheduling, error correction, and handling of complex errors, and build educational materials and engage in research and teaching activities to train undergraduate and graduate students so that they contribute to the domestic quantum workforce.

Fan received the award for work on “High-efficiency and low-noise microwave-to-optical transduction enabled by waveguide-based acoustics.” The project will explore a new transduction method based on itinerant acoustic fields to mediate the transduction between optical and acoustic fields, significantly improving the transduction efficiency and noise performance at the same time.

Shankar received the award for work on “Advancing modular quantum computing with Josephson junction field effect transistors.” The project will establish JJFETs as voltage controlled superconducting elements capable of routing single photon microwave signals between separate quantum modules with high speed, low loss, and low crosstalk.