Palak Chawla

Project Associate, CQuERE

In 2023, Palak completed her Master’s degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Thiruvananthapuram. Her master’s thesis was centered around electronic structure calculations using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) framework within Qiskit. Her focus was particularly on the strategic selection of active spaces in complex molecular structures. This is done to include maximum electron correlation effects, so as to do more accurate approximations of molecular structures when encoded in Qiskit. Her aspirations extend beyond solving intricate problems in many-body theory through quantum computing. She has a keen interest in optimization problems and the development of algorithms in this domain. Currently, she is working towards employing VQE to simulate molecules including the relativistic effects. Outside of work, she is passionate about dance, badminton, chess and cooking.