Q.InC's Dr Koh Enshan Dax Receives APS Outstanding Referee Award and IOP Outstanding Reviewer Award 2025
Congratulations to our Senior Scientist, Dr Koh Enshan Dax, on being selected for the APS Outstanding Referee Award. This highly selective programme recognises scientists who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication. Honourees are selected by the Physical Review editors based on the quality, number, and timeliness of their referee reports.
In addition to this achievement, Dr Koh also received the IOP Outstanding Reviewer Award 2025, which recognises researchers who have delivered exceptional peer review reports over the past year. This award highlights the essential contributions reviewers make in upholding the quality, integrity, and rigour of published research.
Dr Koh conducts research in quantum computing, developing quantum algorithms and theoretical tools to efficiently characterise the properties of quantum systems, while deepening our understanding of the fundamental limits of classical and quantum computation.
One major area of his research is classical shadows, a technique for predicting many properties of a quantum system using only a small number of measurements. Dr Koh has contributed to making these protocols more practical for real quantum devices subject to experimental noise. His work also established a broad theoretical framework based on Pauli-invariant unitary ensembles, expanding the range of measurement schemes that can be applied within the classical shadows approach. These contributions help make quantum devices easier to verify, benchmark, and characterise, enabling useful information to be extracted from quantum systems more efficiently and supporting the development of more reliable quantum technologies.
Dr Koh has also contributed to the development of quantum optimisation algorithms, including work on a variant of the Quantum Approximate Optimisation Algorithm (QAOA) known as eXpressive QAOA (XQAOA), which has the potential to improve performance on certain optimisation problems. This work contributes to broader efforts to design quantum algorithms capable of tackling optimisation tasks that arise in fields such as manufacturing and statistical physics.
In addition, Dr Koh’s research explores the foundations of quantum computational advantage, understanding when quantum computers can outperform classical ones. His work on the sampling hardness of conjugated Clifford circuits contributes to ongoing efforts to characterise the boundary between classically simulable and classically hard quantum computations. He has also worked on deriving estimates for the number of qubits required to demonstrate quantum computational advantage in practice.