About

I’m a Senior Research Scientist at IonQ working on quantum computing.

My research is guided by two questions:

1. What are quantum computers good for?
2. How do we build a quantum computer?

My work spans quantum compilation, quantum algorithms, and complexity theory, with a focus on connecting theory to practical architectures and implementations.

Contact: here, ddhruv@umd.edu

Background

I earned my Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Maryland, where I was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an LPS Quantum Graduate Fellowship, and I was fortunate to be advised by Professor Alexey Gorshkov and Professor Andrew Childs.

I completed my undergrad at UC Berkeley in 2019 with a B.A. in Physics and Computer Science.

While at Berkeley, I did research with Professor Birgitta Whaley in quantum computing. I also did research in experimental particle physics with the ATLAS collaboration under Professor Marjorie Shapiro, where I worked on projects involving new inner detector designs for the LHC as well as searches for Dark Matter candidate particles.

Publications

Google Scholar

arXiv Preprints

1. Quantum Routing and Entanglement Dynamics Through Bottlenecks. Devulapalli, D., Yin, C., Guo, A. Y., Schoute, E., Childs, A. M., Gorshkov, A. V., & Lucas, A. (2026). PRX Quantum, 7(1), 010310. https://doi.org/10.1103/7b1x-hjcy. arXiv:2505.16948. SQuInt 2024, QCTIP 2025, TQC 2025.

2. The Complexity of Thermalization in Finite Quantum Systems. Devulapalli, D., Mooney, T. C., & Watson, J. D. (2026). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.00405. arXiv:2507.00405 [quant-ph]. QIP 2026.

3. Low-depth fermion routing without ancillas. Constantinides, N., Yu, J., Devulapalli, D., Fahimniya, A., Schaeffer, L., Childs, A. M., Gullans, M. J., Schuckert, A., & Gorshkov, A. V. (2025). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.05099. arXiv:2510.05099 [quant-ph].

4. A vapor-cavity-QED system for quantum computation and communication. Austin, S., Devulapalli, D., Hoang, K., Zhou, F., Srinivasan, K., & Gorshkov, A. V. (2025). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.19432. arXiv:2509.19432 [quant-ph].

5. Efficiently Verifiable Quantum Advantage on Near-Term Analog Quantum Simulators. Liu, Z., Devulapalli, D., Hangleiter, D., Liu, Y.-K., Kollár, A. J., Gorshkov, A. V., & Childs, A. M. (2025). PRX Quantum, 6(1), 010341. https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.6.010341. arXiv:2403.08195 [quant-ph]. QSim 2024.

6. Toward a 2D Local Implementation of Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check Codes. Berthusen, N., Devulapalli, D., Schoute, E., Childs, A. M., Gullans, M. J., Gorshkov, A. V., & Gottesman, D. (2025). PRX Quantum, 6(1), 010306. https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.6.010306. arXiv:2404.17676 [quant-ph]. TQC 2024.

7. Optimal Routing Protocols for Reconfigurable Atom Arrays. Constantinides, N., Fahimniya, A., Devulapalli, D., Bluvstein, D., Gullans, M. J., Porto, J. V., Childs, A. M., & Gorshkov, A. V. (2024). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.05061. arXiv:2411.05061 [quant-ph].

8. Quantum routing with teleportation. Devulapalli, D., Schoute, E., Bapat, A., Childs, A. M., & Gorshkov, A. V. (2024). Physical Review Research, 6(3), 033313. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.033313. arXiv:2204.04185 [quant-ph]. QCTIP 2022.

9. Implementing a fast unbounded quantum fanout gate using power-law interactions. Guo, A. Y., Deshpande, A., Chu, S.-K., Eldredge, Z., Bienias, P., Devulapalli, D., Su, Y., Childs, A. M., & Gorshkov, A. V. (2022). Physical Review Research, 4(4), L042016. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L042016. arXiv:2007.00662 [quant-ph]. TQC 2021.

Projects

Deep Learning for Music Genre Classification

Professional Experience

Quantum Computing

IBM Research (Summer 2024) - Quantum Research Intern. At IBM, I worked on fermionic encodings and fault-tolerant compilation.

Zapata Computing (Summer 2022) - Quantum AI Research Intern. At Zapata I worked on a project related to mitigation of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Neural Networks.

QCB

I am the founder and former president of Quantum Computing @ Berkeley, an undergraduate club aiming to spread quantum computing knowledge and connect industry, academia, and students. I also created and taught a DeCal (student run course) on quantum computing in Fall 2018.

Software Engineering

In Summer 2017, I interned at Sonos on the Partner Integrations team, working on app development across Android, iOS, and Windows. In Summer 2018, I interned at Amazon on the AWS Rekognition team, where I worked on developing pipelines for different face detection and recognition models.