Electrical engineer Navin Khaneja has been appointed tenure

Contact: 
steve_bradt@harvard.edu
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - September 12, 2008 - Navin Khaneja, whose work in control theory has sharpened the data available via nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and advanced the nascent field of quantum computing, has been named Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering in Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, effective July 1, 2008.

Khaneja, 35, was previously associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard.

"By using control theory to improve critical technologies such as nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, Navin carries on a longstanding research tradition in engineering at Harvard," says Venkataesh Narayanamurti, dean of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

"The fundamental principles behind NMR, the basis for modern medical imaging, were discovered right here in the 1950s. Moreover, Navin's work has much broader applications for understanding the structure of proteins, advancing quantum computing, and enhancing brain mapping. He is truly a collaborative 'next generation' engineer ideally suited to help SEAS broaden its reach into all areas of the biological and physical sciences."

Control theory, an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics dealing with the behavior of dynamic systems, has wide impacts in electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineering. Potential applications include controllers for consumer electronics, robots, chemical processes, military equipment, and in aerospace technologies.

Khaneja's interdisciplinary work in control theory has strong implications in two distinct areas. In the first, NMR spectroscopy, his work has helped design better techniques of mapping the structure of large biomolecules, which can in turn help in the design and delivery of new drugs.

Scientists' ability to decipher NMR data, used to determine the distance between various parts of complex molecules, can be hampered by excessive background noise that masks the desired signal. Khaneja's research on pulse design has bettered NMR's signal-to-noise ratio, providing stronger information on the structure of biomolecules.

Another area of Khaneja's work, controlling quantum states, is crucial to the potential development of practical quantum computers. While quantum computing is still in its infancy, his work is answering important questions about the future of the field. His research on controlling decoherence addresses a dominant limitation in quantum computing, and could help define the ultimate limits of quantum computing's power.

Khaneja earned his undergraduate degree at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1994, master's degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 1996, and a master's degree and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1999 and 2000, respectively. After serving for one year as an assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College, he joined the Harvard faculty in 2001 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering, earning promotion to associate professor in 2005.

Khaneja was awarded the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award in 2001, was named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 2003, and received the Humboldt Foundation's Bessel Prize in 2005.