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Houston professor earns Google Scholar award for quantum computing research

Nai-Hui Chia, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice, was recognized for his research on Hamiltonian simulations, a method for representing the motion of moving particles. Photo via Rice.edu

A Rice University quantum computer scientist was one of 78 global professors to be presented with a 2023 Google Scholar award, the university announced this month.

Nai-Hui Chia, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice, was recognized for his research on Hamiltonian simulations, a method for representing the motion of moving particles. Chia aims to understand if quantum computers or machines can simulate a "Hamiltonian matrix" with a shorter evolution time.

"We call this fast-forwarding for a Hamiltonian simulation,” Chia says in a statement.

Chia aims to use the funds from Google to discover Hamiltonians that can be fast-forwarded using parallelism or classical computation, according to Rice. He will present his current work on Hamiltonians and their connection to cryptology in July at the 2023 Computational Complexity Conference in Warwick, UK.

The Google Research Scholar program grants funds of up to $60,000 to support professors' research around the world. This year's cohort works in fields ranging from algorithms and optimization to natural language processing to health research.

Three other Texas researchers were awarded funds in the 2023 cohort.

The University of Texas at Austin's Jon Tamir was awarded for his work in applied sciences. Atlas Wang, also from UT, was awarded in the machine learning and data mining category. Shenglong Xu, from Texas A&M University, joined Chia in the quantum computing category.

Tech behemoth Google has awarded funds to several Houston innovators in recent years.

Last summer the company named AnswerBite, Boxes and Ease to its inaugural cohort of the Google for Startups Latino Founders Fund. Selected companies received an equity-free $100,000 investment, as well as programming and support from Google.

In September 2022, ChurchSpace and Enrichly were named part of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund. The companies also received $100,000 non-dilutive awards along with mentoring and support.

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A research team housed out of the newly launched Rice Biotech Launch Pad received funding to scale tech that could slash cancer deaths in half. Photo via Rice University

A research funding agency has deployed capital into a team at Rice University that's working to develop a technology that could cut cancer-related deaths in half.

Rice researchers received $45 million from the National Institutes of Health's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to scale up development of a sense-and-respond implant technology. Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh leads the team developing the technology as principal investigator.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” he says in a news release. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

Joining Veiseh on the 19-person research project named THOR, which stands for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” is Amir Jazaeri, co-PI and professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The device they are developing is called HAMMR, or hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.

“Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process," Jazaeri adds. "As a result, today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

With a national team of engineers, physicians, and experts across synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, and more, the team will receive its funding through the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a newly launched initiative led by Veiseh that exists to help life-saving medical innovation scale quickly.

"Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the ARPA-H, a new funding agency established last year to support research that catalyzes health breakthroughs," Rice President Reginald DesRoches says. "The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

The initial focus of the technology will be on ovarian cancer, and this funding agreement includes a first-phase clinical trial of HAMMR for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer that's expected to take place in the fourth year of THOR’s multi-year project.

“The technology is broadly applicable for peritoneal cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs,” Veiseh says. “The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We'll be able to build on that experience. We have already demonstrated a unique model to go from concept to clinical trial within five years, and HAMMR is the next iteration of that approach.”

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