Connor Blake

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, MA

I am currently a PhD student at MIT in EQuS and a recent graduate of the University of Chicago, where I earned a B.S. in Quantum Engineering with a minor in Computer Science (June 2026). My research interests span autonomous labs, materials science, quantum control, ML, and information theory.

I’ve previously worked with Prof. Liang Jiang at UChicago PME on quantum optics theory and optimal control for hybrid qubit-oscillator systems. Previously, I worked with Prof. Jörn Dunkel at MIT on diffusion models and learning coarse-grained dynamics.

I interned at Atlantic Quantum (later acquired by Google) working on circuit simulation and design automation. I also conducted research with Prof. Shuolong Yang on machine learning-aided thin-film deposition systems, and at Argonne National Laboratory on computational physics of quasicrystals.

I am a Barry Goldwater Scholar (2025) and Stamps Scholar (2024).

You can contact me at cjblake@mit.edu

news

Jun 06, 2026	Graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.S. in Quantum Engineering and a minor in Computer Science.
Nov 05, 2025	Paper published in npj Computational Materials: A self-driving physical vapor deposition system making sample-specific decisions on the fly.
Jun 15, 2025	Started summer research at MIT with Prof. Jörn Dunkel on variational diffusion models and learned coarse-grained dynamics.

selected publications

npj Comput Mater
A self-driving physical vapor deposition system making sample-specific decisions on the fly

Y.B. Zheng, C. Blake, L. Mravac, and 1 more author

npj Computational Materials, Nov 2025

Abs DOI Bib HTML

We present a self-driving physical vapor deposition system that uses a custom Bayesian machine learning algorithm to learn recipes for parametric beamsplitter fabrication, making sample-specific decisions on the fly.
@article{zheng2025selfdriving, title = {A self-driving physical vapor deposition system making sample-specific decisions on the fly}, author = {Zheng, Y.B. and Blake, C. and Mravac, L. and others}, journal = {npj Computational Materials}, volume = {11}, pages = {327}, year = {2025}, month = nov, day = {5}, doi = {10.1038/s41524-025-01805-0}, }