Kanav Setia is the co-founder and CEO of qBraid. He earned a PhD in Physics from Dartmouth College in 2020, where he worked on quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry, with a particular focus on fermion-to-qubit encodings. Dr. Setia’s work on the Bravyi-Kitaev Superfast (BKSF) algorithm was the first to apply BKSF to quantum chemistry simulation. Collaborating with IBM, he developed the Generalized Superfast Encoding (GSE) for quantum simulation. This work was the first to show presence of inherent error-correcting properties within the fermion-to-qubit encodings.

During his PhD, Dr. Setia interned at IBM twice, contributing to IBM’s open-source quantum chemistry software, Qiskit-Chemistry, and Google’s OpenFermion. He was a co-author on the initial releases of both. Dr. Setia also holds a B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Astronomy and Planetary Sciences from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology. After graduation, he worked for four years at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in the MEMS division of the Semi-Conductor Laboratory, focusing on the design and development of accelerometers and gyroscopes.