Pulkit Sinha, a PhD candidate at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, specializing in quantum information, has received a 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award.
Funded through alumni and community support, the $5,000 award celebrates outstanding research by emerging scholars in the Faculty of Mathematics.
Pulkit Sinha is a PhD candidate at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, advised by Professor Ashwin Nayak. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Science and is in the final year of his doctoral studies. As of March 2026, he has authored and coauthored seven publications.
“Receiving the Graduate Research Excellence Award is an incredible honour,” Pulkit says. “Having my work recognized in this way really boosts my confidence in the broader impact of my thesis.”
The award recognizes Pulkit’s paper, “Dimension Independent and Computationally Efficient Shadow Tomography,” a sole-author work, which was accepted for publication at STOC ’25, the 57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.
The work introduces a novel learning algorithm for shadow tomography, a problem that involves estimating the expected values of quantum observables using independent and identically distributed, or IID, copies of an unknown quantum state, Pulkit said.
“A defining feature of the new algorithm is that the required number of IID copies does not scale with the dimension of the quantum system, yielding a quadratic improvement over the trivial approach. Furthermore, the algorithm guarantees both quantum and classical computational efficiency, provided the targeted observables are themselves efficiently measurable.”
Pulkit credits his advisor, Professor Ashwin Nayak of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, for his guidance. “He was the first to see the potential in this result and pushed me to develop it,” he says.
STOC is one of the two premier annual conferences in theoretical computer science, with a highly competitive selection process. Of 735 submissions, only 219 papers were accepted for presentation at STOC 2025. Pulkit’s paper has also been invited to a special issue of the SIAM Journal on Computing devoted to the STOC 2025 conference, an honour reserved for a select few articles.
Other recipients of the 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award are Ruikun Zhou and Xiao Zhong, each of whom received $2,500.