Faculty DirectoryKate Smith
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Electrical and Computer Engineering
Contact
2233 Tech DriveMudd 3504
Evanston, IL 60208-3109
Email Kate Smith
Website
Departments
Education
PhD in Electrical Engineering, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TXMS in Electrical Engineering, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX
BS in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX
Biography
Within the scope of quantum computing, Kate’s active areas of research include computer architecture, distributed computing, optimized compilation, error mitigation, simulation, and security. Prior to joining Northwestern CS in January 2024, Kate was at Infleqtion where she managed the software engineering team responsible for maintaining Superstaq, a physics-aware quantum compiler, and directed the R&D for projects related to optimized compilation, error mitigation, and simulation of quantum programs on a wide range of quantum technology platforms. From January 2020 to September 2022, Kate was a CQE/IBM postdoctoral scholar within the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science where she was a member of the Enabling Practical-Scale Quantum Computing (EPiQC) group . Kate received a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2014 and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2015 from Southern Methodist University (SMU). In addition, she earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at SMU in December 2019.
Kate is a co-author of the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) Best Paper, named a 2021 MIT EECS Rising Star, and a recipient of the 2021 IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multiple Valued Logic (TC-MVL) Kenneth C. Smith Early Career Award in Microelectronics. She has co-authored more than 25 peer-reviewed papers and has served on many conference technical program committees including the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), and the Design Automation Conference (DAC). In 2023, Kate co-organized the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium Five-Year Update to the Next Steps in Quantum Computing Workshop, and in 2022, Kate acted as the Program Chair for the 2022 International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic (ISMVL).