QSE Center awards three Postdoctoral Fellowships

The three postdoctoral fellows are Léa Dubois, Joseph Lap, and André Primo, who were awarded for their proposed projects in the labs of Prof. Jean-Philippe Brantut, Prof. João Penedones, and Prof. Cristina Benea-Chelmus respectively. The evaluation of the applications took place between April and July 2025 and the award will cover two years of salary for each researcher.

Léa Dubois

Léa Dubois is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Quantum Gases at EPFL directed by Prof. Jean-Philippe Brantut. Her work aims to explore light-matter interactions at the quantum level using an innovative device combining a gas of ultracold fermionic atoms with a high-finesse optical cavity. The goal is to simulate complex quantum models, such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, which is linked to quantum chaos and holographic gravity. This project could pave the way for programmable quantum simulators, offering a new tool to understand strongly correlated systems.

Dubois completed her PhD at the Institut d’Optique in the group of Alain Aspect, under the supervision of Isabelle Bouchoule, where she investigated out-of-equilibrium dynamics in one-dimensional Bose gases and developed innovative experimental techniques to probe these systems. Her research lies at the interface of quantum optics and many-body physics, with expertise in cold atom experiments, light-matter interactions, and quantum simulations.

Joseph Lap

Joseph Dominicus Lap will be joining the Fields and Strings Laboratory in October 2025 where he will use modern machine-learning methods to address long-standing open questions in quantum gravity. Quantum mechanical matrix models that arise from string theory – such as BFSS, BMN, and IKKT – are conjectured to describe quantum gravity, black hole physics, and even the emergence of spacetime itself. By leveraging neural-network-based methods to approximate quantum states (NQS), his work aims to overcome long-standing computational barriers and deepen our understanding of the non-perturbative structure of quantum gravity.

Lap began his academic path at Columbia University, earning a B.A. in Physics and Music with additional concentrations in Mathematics and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. He went on to complete an M.A. in Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia before pursuing doctoral studies in theoretical physics at Yale University. There, his work focused on conformal field theories, including entanglement dynamics, and correlators of light-ray operators in large-charge effective field theory. Alongside this, he explored data-driven approaches such as symbolic regression and machine learning for extracting physical laws from data. These experiences form the foundation of his current goal: integrating modern computational tools with theoretical physics to advance our understanding of fundamental physics.

André Garcia Primo

In the project “Towards Scalable Quantum Transducers in the Millimeter-Wave Band”, to be carried out in Cristina Benea-Chelmus’s Hybrid Photonics Lab (HYLAB), André Garcia Primo will integrate lithium niobate photonics with superconducting materials to develop systems capable of coherently converting signals between millimeter-wave and optical frequencies. These quantum transducers promise excellent performance while relaxing the stringent cryogenic requirements of current quantum technologies, making them an interesting addition to the field.

Primo's interest in quantum science began during his undergraduate studies in Engineering Physics at the University of Campinas, Brazil. There, he joined the research group of Prof. Thiago Alegre, where he was introduced to optomechanical systems. Captivated by the topic, André pursued a Ph.D. in Physics through a joint program between the University of Campinas and Stanford University, focusing on dissipation mechanisms and microwave-to-optical transduction in integrated optomechanical devices.