Ebrahim Karimi (; ; born 1978 in Saqqez, Kurdistan Province) is a quantum scientist at University of Ottawa. He is the Canada Research Chair in Structured Waves and Quantum Communication.
Biography.
Karimi was born into a Kurdish family in the city of Saqqez, located in Iran’s Kurdistan Province. Karimi grew up amid the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and completed his early education in his hometown of Saqqez and received his Diplomat from Iqbal Lahouri highschool, before joining Department of Physics at Kerman University in 1997. He received his B.Sc. in Physics with emphasis on mathematics from Kerman University in 2001. He began his graduate studies in the mathematical physics group at IASBS, obtaining 18th place in Iran's University Entrance Exam. Later, he shifted his research focus and under the supervision of Yousef Sobouti, completing his thesis on "Laser Cooling and Trapping of Natural Atoms", and receiving his M.Sc. in optics in 2003. During this time, he also collaborated on singular optics with Mohammad Taghi Tavassoli and H. M. Khalesifard. In 2009, he earned his PhD from the University of Naples Federico II supervised by Lorenzo Marrucci and Enrico Santamato, and received the award for best PhD thesis for his work on "Light Orbital Angular Momentum and Its Applications in Classical and Quantum Information." After completing his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Marrucci and Santamato in Naples. In September 2012, he joined Robert W. Boyd's quantum optics group at University of Ottawa as a postdoctoral fellow. He became assistant professor of physics at Ottawa in 2015, and associate professor in 2020. In 2023 He was the recipient of Rutherford Memorial Medal from the Royal Society of Canada.