I am an assistant professor at the Niels Bohr International Academy (NBIA) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Starting in September 2014 I have been on a 3 year Villum Young Investigator Fellowship (supplemented by a Carlsberg grant) to start a small Quantum Information theory group. I have recently accepted a position as a junior group leader at the University of Cologne. I will be hiring PhD students and Postdocs shortly.

My CV is available on request. My primary e-mail address is mkastoryano_at_gmail_dot_com.

Research interests

My research lies somewhere at the intersection of quantum information theory, condensed matter physics and mathematical physics. During my PhD I studied on the one hand the problem of quantum Markov chain mixing (rigorously bounding how fast a quantum channel converges to stationarity), and on the other, protocols of dissipative state preparation. Since then my interests have shifted a bit more towards condensed matter physics and fault-tolerance. In particular I have worked a lot on designing and analyzing quantum Gibbs sampling algorithms and on various problems in quantum error correction and fault-tolerance theory. Recently, I have been getting very interested in the the phenomenon of bulk-boundary correspondence (and Holography) using tools from the theory of tensor networks.

Brief Biography

I was born in Paris (France), but grew up in Geneva (Switzerland). I hold a Swiss, French and american passport, and speak 5 languages fluently (English, French, Danish, German and Spanish). Since graduating from High School (Matu), I have been incessantly moving around the world, spending five years in the US (Boston & New Haven), 6 years in Denmark (Copenhagen) and 3 years in Germany (Berlin).