Mile Gu
Mile Gu is a New Zealand citizen who completed his undergraduate at the University of Auckland with a triple major in mathematics, physics and computer science. His interest in the cross-disciplinary research in these areas propelled him to do a PhD in the field of quantum computation, graduating from the University of Queensland in 2009. After a 4-year research fellowship at the center for quantum technologies in Singapore, Gu joined Tsinghua University as tenure-track faculty under the Chinese 1000 talent program. In 2016, he moved to the Nanyang Technological University as a National Research Foundation Fellow to establish the Quantum and Complexity Science Initiative – aimed at pioneering a new direction of research that interfaces quantum information and complexity. During his research career, Gu has established a string of novel connections between scientific concepts that were previously unrelated. Notable contributions include a proof – using the methods of theoretical computer science – that not all properties of a macroscopic system can be determined from microscopic laws (see Nature 459, 332-334) and demonstrate that quantum mechanics may change what systems are considered complex (Nat. Comm 3,76). In addition, Gu jointly demonstrated that the simplest solution to a computational problem can be thought as free fall in some curved space, and discovered that different quantum phases may have different computational power.
