Hi there! I am Snehal Raj, a CIFRE PhD Student at LIP6/CNRS - Sorbonne University and QC Ware, under Prof. Elham Kashefi (academic supervisor) & Dr. Brian Coyle (industry supervisor).

My thesis explores:

  • Theoretical study of quantum & quantum-inspired algorithms
  • Empirical validation of these algorithms
  • Bridging quantum and classical machine learning

I graduated from the University of Oxford in 2022 with a Master’s in Advanced Computer Science. My thesis on improving simulations for Google’s supremacy circuits was supervised by Prof. Aleks Kissinger and is available here.

Before that, I was at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur where I majored in Computer Science and Engineering. I worked on Quantum Query Complexity as part of my bachelor’s thesis and was supervised by Prof. Rajat Mittal.

In a past life, I was affiliated with Adobe Research working on LLMs.

Experience

Mar 2023 - Present

Associate Staff Scientist

QC Ware Corp.
Paris, France

Research on real-world applications of Quantum Machine Learning in Industry.

Aug 2020 - Feb 2023

Quantum Algorithms Consultant

QC Ware Corp.
Remote

Machine Learning and Quantum Computing.

Apr 2020 - Jul 2020

Research Intern

Adobe
Bengaluru, India

Used AutoML to distill knowledge from LLMs and automatically create fine-tuned models for downstream tasks. Accepted at EMNLP 2021.

May 2019 - Jul 2019

Machine Learning Consultant

ShopX - 10i Commerce Services
Bengaluru, India

Machine Learning.

May 2018 - Jul 2018

Backend Developer

New York Office, IIT Kanpur
Kanpur, India

Education

2024 - Present

PhD, Quantum Machine Learning

Sorbonne University (CIFRE)
Paris, France

Research on theoretical foundations of Quantum Machine Learning.

2021 - 2022

MSc Computer Science (Distinction)

University of Oxford
Oxford, UK

Thesis on Quantum Graphical Calculus for Tensor Network Contractions.

2017 - 2021

BTech Computer Science & Engineering

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Kanpur, India

GPA: 9.52/10.0 | All India Rank 168. Thesis on Quantum Complexity Theory.

News

  • Nov 2025 Our paper “Training-Efficient Density Quantum Machine Learning” published in npj Quantum Information! Read it here.
  • Aug 2025 Our paper “Bayesian Quantum Orthogonal Neural Networks for Anomaly Detection” published at IEEE Quantum Week 2025! Read it here.
  • Nov 2024 Presented “Training-Efficient Density Quantum Machine Learning” at QTML 2024 in Melbourne! Watch the talk and read the paper.
  • Jun 2024 Started my CIFRE PhD at Sorbonne University / LIP6 and QC Ware, working on quantum & quantum-inspired machine learning!

Selected Publications

2025

  1. npj QI
    Brian Coyle, Snehal Raj, Natansh Mathur, and 4 more authors
    npj Quantum Information, 2025
  2. arXiv
    Snehal Raj, and Brian Coyle
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.06916, 2025
  3. arXiv
    Natansh Mathur, Brian Coyle, Nishant Jain, and 4 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18103, 2025

2023

  1. Quantum
    El Amine Cherrat, Snehal Raj, Iordanis Kerenidis, and 12 more authors
    Quantum, 2023

2021

  1. EMNLP
    Sharmila Reddy Nangi, Atharv Tyagi, Jay Mundra, and 4 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2021

Beyond Research

Playing Drums 🏸 Badminton Table Tennis