Francisca Vasconcelos
CS PhD @ UC Berkeley Theory Group and BAIR Lab.

francisca @ berkeley.edu
I am a PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I am co-advised by Profs Michael Jordan and Umesh Vazirani. My research interests lie at the intersection of quantum computation and machine learning theory.
In 2020, I received a BS in EECS and Physics from MIT, where I was fortunate to do substantial undergraduate research advised by Prof. William Oliver in the MIT Engineering Quantum Systems group. As an undergraduate, I also interned under Dr. Marcus da Silva at Rigetti Computing and Microsoft Research Quantum. Supported by a Rhodes Scholarship, I received two masters from the University of Oxford: an MSc in Statistical Sciences and MSt in Philosophy of Physics. Following from the MSc, I performed statistical ML research in the OxCSML group, advised by Prof. Yee Whye Teh.
I am also the Founding Academic Director of the Qubit x Qubit (QxQ) initiative of The Coding School (TCS) non-profit. Since 2019, we have trained 20,000+ diverse K-12 students, undergraduates, and members of the workforce worldwide in the fundamentals of quantum computing and QISE.