Shayan Majidy awarded W.B. Pearson Medal

Shayan Majidy has been awarded the W.B. Pearson Medal from the University of Waterloo for his PhD thesis, which he completed jointly at Perimeter Institute and University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing . He was supervised by Raymond Laflamme, Perimeter researcher and a faculty member at University of Waterloo, and co-advised by Nicole Yunger Halpern, adjunct assistant professor at the University of Maryland and a former Perimeter Scholars International student.

The W.B. Pearson Medal is presented annually to one doctoral student in each department of the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Science. The medal honours creative research in the candidate’s thesis.

Majidy’s thesis, “Effects of Noncommuting Charges in Quantum Information and Thermodynamics,” tackled a common assumption in physics – that conserved quantities commute. “This assumption loosely means that measuring one quantity – say your coffee’s temperature – doesn't affect another – like how much coffee is in your cup,” he explains.

However, non-commutation of quantities plays an important role in quantum physics and underlies concepts like the uncertainty principle. Majidy’s thesis dove into the physical consequences of lifting this assumption and allowing quantities to not commute.  

Majidy is now a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University where his research focuses on quantum computing and many-body physics. He says that receiving the medal was both “a surprise and a huge honour” because the University of Waterloo and Perimeter attract world-class physics students tackling ambitious problems at a high level. “I spent my PhD genuinely inspired by the talent around me.”