Mihir Bhaskar

SVP, Research & Decelopment IONQ

Dr. Mihir Bhaskar is currently Senior Vice President of Global R&D at IonQ. He joined IonQ following the acquisition of Lightsynq, a Boston-based quantum interconnect startup he co-founded and where he served as CEO. Founded by Harvard quantum networking experts including Mihir, Lightsynq focused on developing memory-enhanced photonic interconnects to enable fast, scalable connections between quantum computing modules. Before IonQ and Lightsynq, Mihir was a research associate at Harvard University and launched and led the Amazon Web Services Center for Quantum Networking (AWS CQN). His PhD thesis at Harvard focused on diamond nanophotonic quantum memories, the technology on which Lightsynq was founded. During his PhD in 2020, he led the first ever demonstration of quantum networking rate enhancements using this approach. The acquisition of Lightsynq by IonQ in mid-2025 significantly accelerated IonQ's quantum computing and networking roadmaps, and Mihir is now leading all of IonQ's efforts to scale quantum computers using this modular approach and build distributed quantum networking capabilities.