Ilya Kuprov

Ilya Kuprov FRSC is a British physicist whose research focuses on quantum theory of magnetic processes and nuclear magnetic resonance. He has received the 2022 Atreya Award, for his work on magnetic resonance theory. Kuprov is a Professor of Physics at the School of Chemistry of the University of Southampton in the UK,a Deputy Editor at the Science Advances magazine, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry,and a Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance.In 2023, he has published a monograph on theoretical and computational spin dynamics.
==Birth and education==
Kuprov was born in Polevskoy in what was then Soviet Union, and raised in Tarko-Sale, a small town near the Siberian Arctic Circle. He completed his undergraduate studies in environmental chemistry at Novosibirsk State University in 2002, and moved to the UK in the same year. In 2005, he received his DPhil degree in physical chemistry from the Corpus Christi College of the University of Oxford under the direction of Peter Hore.
==Career==
In 2005 Kuprov was elected a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2009, he received an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship, which he held at the Oxford Supercomputing Centre. In 2014 he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Southampton and later promoted to Professor.In 2018, Kuprov has joined the editorial board of Science Advances as an Associate Editor; he became Deputy Editor in 2021.From 2010 to 2021 he had been a committee member and then the Secretary of the Electron Spin Resonance Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
==Research==
Kuprov's research focuses on theoretical and computational methods in magnetic resonance. As of 2023, his work has produced over 100 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals and a monograph on spin dynamics.
===Spin dynamics theory and software=== 
In June 2007, Kuprov and co-workers published the first polynomial complexity simulation algorithm for magnetic resonance experiments. The resulting software package, called Spinach, ran time-domain NMR simulations of protein spin systems on desktop workstations — an unprecedented achievement at the time. The algorithm, based on identifying and dropping dynamically inaccessible and inconsequential spin states,is currently used in most time-domain simulations of large spin systems in magnetic resonance.
In total, Kuprov's research groups at the Universities of Oxford and Southampton have published over 50 peer-reviewed papers on complexity scaling, numerical efficiency, and parallelisation improvements in spin dynamics simulations.
===Quantum optimal control theory===
Between 2011 and 2023, research groups led by Kuprov have published a number of improvements to the Gradient Ascent Pulse Engineering (GRAPE) algorithm for quantum optimal control. They introduced machine-precision fidelity gradient, adapted quasi-Newton and Newton-Raphson optimisation routines, made improvements in numerical efficiency and parallelisation,and proposed a number of logistical additions to GRAPE, such as keyhole subspaces and piecewise-linear control sequences.
===Neural network descrambler groups===
In August 2020, using the mathematical methods they had previously developed for quantum spin dynamics, Kuprov and co-authors found a group-theoretical procedure that brings inner layer signalling of fully connected neural networks into a human-readable form. Their paper on the subject describes the procedure as "a step towards saving reductionism" (referring the the common practice of using black box neural networks) and notes that the descrambling process has the same computational complexity as neural network training.The same project has yielded DEERNet, a tool for processing DEER data.
===Collaborative work===
Kuprov's collaborative research deals with difficult problems in computational modelling of electromagnetic and spin processes. As a theory and simulation specialist in different teams of researchers, he has co-authored papers on magnetic navigation of migratory birds,spin dynamics in photosynthesis,lanthanide contrast agents for MRI, chemically induced dynamic nuclear polarization of amino acids, toroidal spectroscopy of atoms,electron spin resonance problems in structural biology,quantum optimal control theory, and gravitation sensors using atom interferometers.
==Bibliography==
 
Area 	Publisher	Title 	Date	
Physics	Springer 	SPIN: from Basic Symmetries to Quantum Optimal Control	 	
==Awards and honors==
*1999 Russian National Undergraduate Chemistry Student Olympics, gold medal
*1999 and 2000 National Mendeleev Prizes for Undergraduate Student Research 
*2002 Scatcherd European Scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford
*2005 Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford
*2009 EPSRC Early Career Fellowship
*2010 Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford
*2015 Fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry
*2021 Fellowship of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance
*2022 Atreya Award for services to Magnetic Resonance
Category:1983 births
Category:People from Polevskoy
Category:British people
Category:Alumni of the University of Oxford
Category:Physicists