Erika Ye receives Luis. W. Alvarez Fellowship in Computer Sciences

Paul Rivenberg  |  PSFC News

April 17, 2023

MIT Postdoctoral Associate Erika Ye has been awarded a Luis W. Alvarez Fellowship in Computer Sciences from the Berkeley Lab of Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California. Established in 2002, the fellowship offers recent Ph.D.’s the opportunity to work at a premier national laboratory, with access to advanced computing tools.

Ye, who has a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from California Institute of Technology (2021), works in Prof. Nuno Loureiro’s Nonlinear Plasma Dynamics Group at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), where she is developing quantum-inspired methods for solving partial differential equations with reduced computational cost. For Ye, it is a return to MIT, where she received both her B.S. (2014) and M.Eng (2015).

At Caltech, Ye promoted a method of solving PDEs that used a computational tool called “Tensor Networks (TN),” mainly in the context of quantum chemistry and quantum condensed matter. But as she finished her dissertation, she felt motivated to pursue different applications.

“I knew this tool could be useful in other areas,” she says. “After talking with others, I learned that researchers were looking into using quantum computers for solving PDEs for fusion applications.”

Prof. Loureiro feels he and his group were the beneficiaries of Ye’s change of direction. 

“I had a search on for a post-doc,” notes Loureiro, “Erika applied, and impressed me and others in the interview with her knowledge, motivation, and this really good idea of hers that you could use TNs as a. quantum-inspired algorithm for simulating plasma dynamics.”

The fellowship will take Ye back to the familiar west coast, where she grew up and received her PhD. Although she will be sorry to leave New England and her MIT colleagues in the fall, working at LBNL will provide her with a focused computing and mathematics community to further her research.

“This position at the PSFC allowed me to pursue very unique research that I argue would have been difficult to do elsewhere, simply because it's a young idea that lies at a niche intersection of classical and quantum.”