⚛️ First participated Paper pays back

Thrilled to share that the paper I contributed to during my undergraduate in Riccardo Sapienza’s lab at Imperial College London has finally been published in Springer Nature Communications!

I’m honoured to be the only female author on the list — and even more excited to be a co-author alongside the legendary Sir John Pendry.

This was the very first research project I ever participated in. I joined at the end of my third year of undergrad, mainly assisting with data processing and some peripheral experimental work. Although my contribution was modest, I’m truly, truly happy to see it come to fruition.

While this paper took a long while to get accepted — it has finally been published during my first year of PhD at UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Decision Making for Complex Systems, which makes it feel all the more special. Even though I’ve since moved to the CS department (supervised by Michele Caprio and Samuel Kaski) and am no longer working directly in quantum optics, this experience has ignited my desire to bridge my current research with physics, especially quantum optics.

Looking back, I’m deeply grateful for the incredibly supportive and encouraging environment of the lab, especially with the help of Stefano Vezzoli, Cynthia Vidal, and Anthony Harwood. It was such a formative and inspiring chapter of my academic journey.

Here’s to growing faster, staying humble, learning from those ahead of me — and hopefully publishing my own first-author paper soon!