Natalia is an early-career researcher working as a postdoctoral research associate in the Beyond Binary Quantum Information Laboratory (BBQLab) at Heriot-Watt. She obtained her B.Sc. in Physics from the National University of Colombia, and her M.Sc. in Photonics with the Europhotonics Erasmus Mundus Joint master’s program. Natalia received her PhD from Heriot-Watt University, under the supervision of Professor Mehul Malik, for which she was awarded the prize for the most outstanding contribution to the university’s research in 2023.

Natalia is currently funded by the EPSRC and Scottish Enterprise as an entrepreneurial lead to bring entanglement technologies that fully utilize the potential of light to the commercial sector.

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).