Hi, I’m Conrad Qu. I’m a senior at Duke double majoring in electrical engineering and math, although I spend most of my time doing physics.

I’m currently working with my friend Andres Torrubia on pushing the limits of how electromagnetism can be controlled, advised by Prof. David R. Smith.

This past summer, I worked on optics and simulation at Lumotive, a programmable optics startup. While there I optimized the optical efficiency of their chips through inverse design and also spent some time developing fast hardware implementations of optical wavefront computation.

My background is mostly in mathematics. I was a PRUV Fellow at Duke, where I worked with Prof. Di Fang on quantum simulation and numerical analysis. We proved new error bounds for simulating the semiclassical Schrödinger equation, published in the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis. Paper

Over time, I’ve become increasingly drawn toward physics and hardware. As more of what we do with bits becomes easier to automate, I think many of the most interesting problems are moving toward atoms.

I also co-lead Duke HackerFab, where I built a spin coater with my friend Shreyas.

A while back, in a previous life, I played competitive hockey and some saxophone. These days, I’m a jiu-jitsu white belt and a very beginner electric guitarist.

You can reach me at conrad.qu@duke.edu or LinkedIn.