Dr. Natalia Herrera Valencia is a postdoctoral researcher at the Beyond Binary Quantum Information Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University. 

With nearly a decade of experience in quantum photonics, she has worked across research groups in five countries. She holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the National University of Colombia, an M.Sc. in Photonics from the Europhotonics Erasmus Mundus programme, and a PhD from Heriot-Watt University, where she received an award for outstanding research contribution in 2023.

Building on this background, she combines technical and commercial insight to lead the technological and business development of Intertangle. Through Innovate UK’s ICURe and Scottish Enterprise’s High Growth Spinout Programme, she has helped drive Intertangle’s early strategy, with UKRI and EPSRC grants supporting technology development and contributing to over £600k in pre-spinout funding.

Joseph is an early-career researcher who joined the Edinburgh Mostly Quantum Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University to work on developing technologies for producing multi-photon entanglement which can be deployed over fibre-based networks for quantum communication applications. He completed his PhD in Australia with Professor Geoff Pryde, where he worked on building an all-optical quantum Fredkin gate using highly entangled photon pair sources. 

Mehul is a world-renowned expert in quantum technologies based on light. He leads the Beyond Binary Quantum Information Laboratory (BBQLab) at Heriot-Watt University. He is a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, Fellow of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America), and an Associate Editor for the journal Optica. He has won several awards for his research contributions, including the Royal Society of Edinburgh Early Career Medal in the Physical and Engineering Sciences and The Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in the UK. He has held several prestigious grants including the ERC Starting grant, an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship, and a Marie-Sklowdowska Curie fellowship in the group of 2022 Physics Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger. He is also a co-Investigator in two UK National Quantum Technology Hubs: Integrated Quantum Networks (IQN) and Quantum Imaging, Sensing, and Timing (QuSIT).

Alessandro Fedrizzi has a 20 year track record in the development of photonic quantum technologies for foundational research and applications in quantum computing, communication and sensing. Completing his PhD in 2008 under the supervision of 2022 Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger, he then spent 7 years—including three on an ARC Discovery Early Career Award— as a research fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. He joined Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh in 2015, where he is now a professor at the Institute of Photonics & Quantum Sciences leading the Edinburgh Mostly Quantum Laboratory. Alessandro’s primary research interests are in the engineering of advanced quantum light sources for quantum networking and satellite quantum communication. He has held the EPSRC Early Career Quantum Technology Fellowship, is an assistant director of the Integrated Quantum Networks Hub (IQN) and a co-director of the EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Applied Quantum Technologies