“I nominate my thesis advisor, Professor Matthew Otten, for the Excellence in Honors Thesis Advising. His mentorship through the difficult hurdles in the research process was of great support throughout my undergraduate research experience. He impacted my ability not to be afraid of presenting my results and pushed me to learn independently and confidently. His commitment to helping me perfect my academic writing helped me a lot with being ready to properly record all of the relevant information and present it in a cohesive manner. He even encouraged me to take a graduate course in physics, which was a very difficult, but very rewarding experience at the same time. He is committed to all of his students and is creating a great environment of researchers in his group, and it was great to see the group grow and expand profoundly.”
“Under Prof. Matthew Otten’s mentorship over the past year, I conducted independent research in quantum error mitigation for bosonic codes. The project resulted in a co-authored paper now under review at npj Quantum Information, a contributed talk at the 2026 APS March Meeting, and a citation in the Error Correction Zoo, a community reference catalog for quantum codes. These outcomes grew directly from Matt’s approach to undergraduate research. After a few warm-up activities, Matt encouraged me to find my own research topic and bring it back to him. From there, I drove the project from problem identification through simulation, analysis, writing and presenting. He mentors multiple undergraduates with this same expectation, trusting students with real problems where they set the direction. When I learned that many peers’ advisors assigned them fragments of a larger agenda, I understood how invaluable his trust was. His guidance showed up when it mattered most. When I hit a computational bottleneck — an optimization step that took days per iteration — Matt returned from a conference where he had spoken with Victor Albert, whose foundational work I was building on, and pointed me to a recent work on optimal recovery map. Once I implemented it, simulation times dropped from days to hours, and I could iterate, make mistakes and learn, much faster. This year shaped me as a researcher. I learned to develop physical intuition into a thesis, conduct literature analysis, run simulations, iterate on results, and communicate findings to both specialist and general audiences. Matt made this possible by being someone I could think freely around, ask honestly, and grow alongside.”