from left to right: Thomas Roth, Ulrich Jakobus, President of ACES and Prof. Andy Peterson, Past President of ACES

Thomas Roth, assistant professor in Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received the 2026 ACES Early Career Award for his contributions to computational electromagnetics and quantum information technologies.

The award, presented by the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society, honors achievements and contributions in computational electromagnetics by a researcher age 35 or younger at the time of nomination. Roth was recognized “for contributions to the development of multiscale and multiphysics computational techniques for the analysis and design of quantum information technologies.”

“I am honored to receive this recognition from ACES and grateful for the colleagues, students and collaborators who have helped shape this work,” Roth said. “Quantum technologies hold enormous promise, but designing the hardware that will make them practical requires new ways of modeling very complex systems. Our goal is to develop computational tools that make that process faster, more reliable and more accessible to researchers and engineers.”

Roth received the award May 26 during the ACES 2026 banquet in Thessaloniki, Greece.

At Purdue, Roth leads the Computational Quantum Electromagnetics Lab, which develops advanced modeling methods to help engineers better understand and design quantum information processing hardware.

Quantum technologies have the potential to transform computing, communication and sensing, but building reliable hardware for these systems is extremely complex. The devices often involve many interacting physical effects across different scales, from tiny quantum components to larger electromagnetic systems. Roth’s research helps address that challenge by creating mathematical and computational tools that allow researchers to study these systems more efficiently and accurately.

His lab develops multiscale and multiphysics modeling methods, which means the team creates ways to analyze systems that involve different sizes, materials and physical behaviors at the same time. These tools can help engineers predict how quantum hardware will perform before it is built, reducing the need for costly trial and error in the lab.

The lab’s methods often provide orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency compared with existing approaches, making it possible to model complex quantum systems that would otherwise be too time-consuming or computationally expensive to study.

The ACES Early Career Award recognizes Roth’s growing impact in the field and his role in advancing computational methods for next-generation quantum technologies.