George Pennington
PhD Student (UoE&Hartree Centre)
Research Interests:
Quantum computing,
Simulation of quantum systems,
tensor networks
I am a first year part-time PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, in Dr Steven Thomson's research group, and I have also been employed as a Quantum Software Engineer at the Hartree Centre, STFC since November 2023.
I received my integrated Master's degree in physics from the University of Oxford in 2023. My PhD research is focused on developing a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for simulating the time-evolution of quantum many-body systems, based on Dr Steven Thomson's previous work on the flow equation method. My research at the Hartree Centre is focused on quantum applications for near-term devices, including approximate quantum compilation (AQC) for MPS preparation, simulation of many-body systems, local quench spectroscopy, and combinatorial optimisation problems
Featured Publications
Variational preparation of normal matrix product states on quantum computers https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09683
Boosting Sparsity in Graph Decompositions with QAOA Sampling
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10657
Approximate quantum circuit compilation for proton-transfer kinetics on quantum processors
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08996