Recipients of INSA Young Associates(IYA) - 2026

Dr. Prabha Mandayam is a quantum information theorist at IIT Madras whose research spans foundational and applied aspects of quantum information science. Her work focuses on quantum error correction, including approximate and noise-adapted schemes crucial for fault-tolerant quantum computation. She has contributed to understanding quantum communication channels, including capacity limits in realistic settings such as queue-based decoherence models, and to quantum cryptography, including quantum key distribution protocols. Her research also addresses entanglement and quantum correlations, including the entangling power of quantum gates and measurement incompatibility, as well as connections to uncertainty principles. More broadly, she has contributed to the mathematical structure of quantum information theory and the interface between quantum information, functional analysis, and emerging quantum technologies.