Maissam Barkeshli is a Professor in the Department of Physics, a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, and a QuICS Affiliate Fellow. As a theoretical condensed matter physicist, he studies emergent universal properties of quantum many-body systems. These include the interplay of symmetry and topology in interacting quantum systems, the higher categorical structure of topological defects, and their applications to fault-tolerant quantum computation. More recently he also explores the fundamental scientific foundations of modern deep learning systems. Barkeshli received his doctorate in physics from MIT in 2010.
