Yesterday, my PhD student Joe Gibbs successfully defened his PhD thesis in front of internal examiner Jack Henderson and external examiner Andrew Green from UCL. Joe’s thesis covers quite a broad range of topics broadly linked by quantum computing algorithms with nuclear physics algorithms. Some of that linking includes finding classical ways of solving problems inspired by looking into quantum computing, and indeed the final piece of work uses classical methods to generate approximate solutions to a problem that a quantum computer could take as a good starting point for further calculations.

As a supervisor, I wasn’t allowed to be present at the PhD exam (“viva”) itself, but the examiners reported back that he did excellently well, and approved his PhD thesis with no corrections. Here’s Joe celebrating with the external examiner Andrew Green after the viva.