Rate My Professor Edwin Barnes

Edwin Barnes is a Professor of Physics and the Roger H. Moore and Mojdeh Khatam-Moore Dean’s Faculty Fellow in the Department of Physics at Virginia Tech, where he joined the faculty in 2015. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, followed by a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Prior to his appointment at Virginia Tech, Barnes held postdoctoral positions at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, and served as a senior research associate at the University of Maryland. His research centers on theoretical quantum information science, spanning quantum computation, quantum control, quantum communication, and quantum networks. This work enables advancements in secure communications and computing capabilities that address problems intractable for classical computers. Barnes leads the Barnes research group, comprising 11 graduate students and nine postdoctoral researchers, and has been instrumental in establishing the Virginia Tech Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering (VTQ), where he also contributes to quantum information science and engineering education programs.

Barnes has received the National Science Foundation Early Career Faculty (CAREER) award in 2019 and the Roger H. Moore and Mojdeh Khatam-Moore Dean’s Faculty Fellowship in 2023 for a three-year term. He has authored over 110 peer-reviewed publications, accumulating more than 8,370 citations, and delivered 60 invited or keynote presentations at professional conferences. As principal investigator or co-principal investigator, he manages 20 grants from agencies including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Key publications include “Preparing Bethe Ansatz Eigenstates on a Quantum Computer” (PRX Quantum, 2021), “Dynamically corrected gates from geometric space curves” (Quantum Science and Technology, 2022), “Symmetry breaking slows convergence of the ADAPT Variational Quantum Eigensolver” (Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, 2022), “An automated geometric space curve approach for designing dynamically corrected gates” (npj Quantum Information, 2026), “Minimal state-preparation times for silicon spin qubits” (npj Quantum Information, 2025), and “Quantum thermalization and Floquet engineering in a spin ensemble with a clock transition” (Nature Physics, 2025). His contributions significantly influence the field through innovative algorithms and protocols for quantum devices.