Members
Group leader
Peter Kirton
Peter is a Chancellor's Fellow in the CNQO group of the Department of Physics at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this he was an Erwin Schrödinger Quantum fellow in the Atominstitut at TU Wien based in the group of Peter Rabl and an EPSRC postdoctoral fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews where he collaborated closely with Jonathan Keeling and Brendon Lovett. His PhD was with Andrew Armour at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on developing techniques for understanding complex, many-body, and non-Markovian open quantum systems.
Postdocs
Chris Oliver
Chris is a postdoc working on multimode cavity QED, disordered Boson systems and dissipative phase transitions. He is using techniques from open quantum systems generally, including non-Markovian methods, and varied numerical methods including neural network quantum states, DMRG, quantum Monte Carlo, all with Julia and Python. He is part of the CNQO group of the Department of Physics at the University of Strathclyde. He previously spent two years as a Senior Analogue Quantum Applications Engineer at the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), at Harwell in Oxfordshire, with a particular focus on neutral atom quantum computing. He completed his PhD in the group of Professor Hannah Price at the University of Birmingham in summer 2023. He worked on topological models in cold atom and photonic systems, particularly the quantum Hall effect. He has also spent time as a visiting scholar at the University of Trento, Italy, working in the Pitaevskii Centre with Iacopo Carusotto. Chris is very open to collaboration and is excited to broaden his view of the physics of open quantum systems, with a particular curiosity about quantum biology, the intersection of biology and physics in general, quantum error correction and quantum thermodynamics.
Marvin Syed
Marvin joined the group as a postdoc in spring 2026. He earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he worked (among other things) on using techniques from the statistical physics of spin glasses to understand physics-inspired analogue computing devices. His supervisor was Natalia Berloff. Before that, he was a M.Sc. student and research assistant in the group of Tilman Enss at the University of Heidelberg, working on dynamical quantum phase transition, PT symmetry, and long-range interacting quantum many-body systems. At Strathclyde, he is working on supersolid and quantum droplet phases of matter in laser-driven Bose-Einstein condensates, as well as various other topics under the umbrella of quantum many-body physics.
PhD Students
Lorenzo Carfora
Lorenzo's project focuses on the influence of lattice geometry and incommensurability on ultracold bosonic gases. Indeed, exotic phases of matter can emerge due to this element. Following this philosophy, Lorenzo focused on the ladder lattice and the formation of the Rung-Mott Insulator, an insulating phase made up of bosons delocalised over the rungs. The topic is also of interest for experimentalists, as it entails the possibility of observing said phase. Because of this, Lorenzo works in a close collaboration with the $^{87}$Rb quantum gas microscope lab lead by Stefan Kuhr.
Former members
Ewen Lawrence
Ewen is from Bexhill, in the south of England. He joined the group in the summer of 2021 as a PhD student. He attended the university of St Andrews where he graduated with a masters in theoretical physics. During his masters project with Brendon Lovett and Gerald Fux, he started study non-Markovian open quantum systems. This is now his main reserach topic, focusing on numericaly exact methods such as TEMPO and HOPS.
Simon Kothe
Simon joined the group in the autumn of 2020 as a PhD student. He studied for his Bachelor's and Master's at the University of Hamburg in the groups of Prof. Peter Schmelcher and Prof. Daniela Pfannkuche, respectively. In the year before his PhD he did a research internship in the group of Prof. Fabian Pauly at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the devlopment of Neural Network Quantum State architectures for the representation of density matrices.