Creating Tomorrow

Urbasi Sinha is a Professor at the Raman Research Institute (RRI) in Bangalore, India. She is heading the Quantum Information and Computing (QuIC) laboratory at RRI. She is an associate faculty member at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), Canada, and the Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control, University of Toronto, Canada. She completed her PhD at Cambridge University, UK, on experiments in high temperature superconductivity. She completed her M.Sc. in Physics (Natural Sciences Tripos), also from Cambridge. She was a Gates Cambridge scholar during her Ph.D. and a Nehru-Chevening scholar during her masters. She was a post-doctoral research associate in the Cavendish labs, Cambridge as well as at IQC Canada. Her lab at RRI specializes in experiments on quantum information processing including quantum computing, secure quantum communication (both quantum key distribution as well as entanglement distribution-based quantum repeater approaches) as well as quantum imaging and sensing primarily using single and entangled photons. She is heading India’s first project on satellite based secure quantum communications. 

Sinha has been awarded several extramural grants from national agencies in India like the Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Govt. of India and the Indian Space Research Organization as well as international agencies like the John Templeton Foundation USA as well as the India Trento Programme for Advanced research. Her scientific recognitions include the Homi Bhabha Fellowship in the year 2017, the 2018 ICTP-ICO Gallieno Denardo Award in Optics, being recognised as one of Asia’s Top 100 scientists by the Asian Scientist for the year 2019 as well as the Simon’s Emmy Noether Fellowship at the Perimeter Institute, Canada from 2020 to 2022. In August 2020, she led the two-member winning team as a mentor, at the World Skills International Competition in Quantum Technology at the BRICS Future Skills Challenge, organised by the Russian Quantum Centre in Moscow, Russia with competitors from several countries worldwide. She won the ASSOCHAM Women in Cyber: Making a Difference award in the category “Cyber - Leading from the front” in 2021. Recently, she has been awarded the prestigious 26th SIES Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi National Eminence award for the year 2023 in the domain of science and technology as well as the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Photonic Quantum Science and Technologies by the Govt. of Canada.