James Bartusek

James Bartusek will be joining New York University as a postdoctoral fellow in the fall of 2024, hosted by Nir Bitansky. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Sanjam Garg. His research interests are in the foundations of cryptography and quantum information. In particular, he studies how quantum technology can be utilized to improve information security and privacy, and he designs cryptographic protocols for safeguarding information and computation in the era of quantum computers.

Bartusek has been particularly fascinated by the idea of program obfuscation, which renders computer code unintelligible without harming its functionality. His work has established the feasibility of obfuscating general-purpose classes of quantum computation, and explored the implications of this ability. For example, obfuscating quantum computation provides the ability to protect arbitrary software from being copied, and yields new protocols for classically verifying the correctness of quantum computations. He is looking forward to working on further topics at the intersection of cryptography and quantum computation during his appointment as a Simons Junior Fellow.