Photo provided by Amitav Krishna
A Simcoe high school student is proving that age is no barrier to cutting-edge research.
Amitav Krishna, who will begin Grade 11 this fall at Holy Trinity Catholic High School, recently presented his quantum computing research at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Control, Computing, and Learning (qCCL) in Aalborg, Denmark. His trip was made possible by an $8,400 grant from Emergent Ventures, a global fellowship program that supports innovative ideas with the potential to improve society.
Krishna’s research uses machine learning to reduce “noise” in quantum computer measurements. In quantum computing, noise is any unwanted interference that makes results less accurate.
Improving those measurements could help advance future technologies, including quantum sensors that researchers hope could one day detect diseases more accurately. The project began through the TKS youth mentoring program after Krishna explored whether quantum technology could be used for cancer detection. While that idea proved impractical, it led him to a new challenge: finding better ways to reduce noise and improve the accuracy of quantum measurements.
Krishna paid for the early stages of the project himself, spending about $100 to rent powerful computer processors. He told Norfolk Today that even a test run using less than one one-hundredth of the data from his final experiments took two days to process on his laptop, making rented computing power essential.
His research was accepted for presentation, making him one of the youngest attendees at the international conference, where most presenters were PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and university professors.
This summer, Krishna is continuing his work with researchers at the California Institute of Technology’s Material and Process Simulation Center, studying materials that could improve light-activated water splitting for clean hydrogen production.
While he has not settled on a university yet, Krishna hopes to eventually build technologies that help others solve difficult problems. He said he hopes to create tools with the same kind of broad impact as the Python programming language and Amazon Web Services, making advanced technology more accessible to researchers and developers.
The international recognition marks another milestone for the young researcher, whose work is already contributing to conversations in quantum science.
Written by Jeremy Hall
