Prem Kumar

Prem Kumar is an Indian-American physicist and engineer who is a professor and Director of the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing at Northwestern University. His research focuses on quantum computing, quantum communications, and photonics. His research creates robust photonic communication between quantum devices, with a particular emphasis on developing next-generation fibre-based quantum networks. He is a Fellow of SPIE, Optica, the Institute of Physics, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Early life and education Kumar studied physics at Delhi University. He moved to the Indian Institutes of Technology for his master's degree, before joining the University at Buffalo for his doctoral research. After earning his doctorate Kumar was appointed as a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Research and career In 1986, Kumar joined Northwestern University. He was made a professor in 1991, and Director of the Centre for Photonic Communication in 2000. He founded NuCrypt in 2003, a company which generates, distributes and measures entangled photons.

In 2010, Kumar was made Editor in Chief of Optica. In 2013, he left Northwestern to serve as a program manager for DARPA, where he was named Program Manager of the Year in 2015 and awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service in 2016. At DARPA, Kumar led the Fundamental Limits of Photon Detection ('Detect') program. Detect looked to understand whether a single photon detector could simultaneously optimize key performance metrics—including efficiency, timing resolution, bandwidth, photon-number resolution, operating temperature, and noise characteristics—or whether fundamental quantum-mechanical tradeoffs impose limits on detector performance. The program had implications for applications such as LIDAR, astronomy, communications, medical imaging, microscopy, quantum information processing, and remote sensing.

Kumar has contributed to the development of quantum teleportation and quantum networking over existing telecommunications infrastructure. He demonstrated the distribution of quantum entanglement over a 24.4 km fibre link between Evanston and downtown Chicago while the same fibre simultaneously carried commercial internet traffic. The experiment achieved entanglement fidelity exceeding 94%, representing the first reported demonstration of entanglement distribution between remote nodes over a fibre carrying modern telecommunications data. The team employed wavelength separation techniques, placing quantum signals in the optical O-band while classical communications remained in the C-band, and used the White Rabbit timing system to synchronize the network at picosecond precision. His research group has subsequently pursued metropolitan-scale quantum teleportation and the development of practical quantum internet architectures. Elected (Life) Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Elected Fellow of SPIE 2004 International Quantum Communications Award 2006 Walder Research Excellence Award 2013 Hermann Anton Haus Lecture 2025 Researcher to Know, IL Science and Technology Coalition

Selected publications