Unmol Sharma

I'm a Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholar studying Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Vanderbilt. I like building things that need real scientific innovation to work: a biological hydrogen startup, quantum computing research, and a secure way to communicate in space.

Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics, Vanderbilt University, class of 2029. Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholar.

Experience

Undergraduate Researcher, Radiation Effects Group, Vanderbilt (Oct 2026 to present)

Head of Timing Sync, CubeSat QKD Mission Design Team (2025 to present)

Co-founder, Purple Hydrogen (2024 to present)

Researcher, Simulation, Optimization & Learning (SOL) Lab, Vanderbilt (2026)

Co-founder, Cultura (2023 to 2024)

Junior Researcher, UofT Clean Energy Lab (2023)

Summer Intern, Scotiabank / Scotia Wealth Management (2023)

Projects

Hardware

FPGA neural network accelerator: A 784→30→30→10→10→10 network in Verilog and SystemVerilog, from PyTorch training through Q2.13 quantization to synthesis on a Lattice ECP5-85K. 95.24% accuracy, bit-exact with software across 10,000 images, 22.34 MHz Fmax and about 24,800 inferences per second. Found and fixed 8 hardware and numerical bugs on the way.

QubeSat FPGA: The timing core for the QubeSat payload on an Artix-7. A time-to-digital converter built from 192 taps of the fast carry chain timestamps photon arrivals at about 22 ps per tap, with code-density calibration. A clock-recovery loop (NCO, phase detector, noise gate and gear-shifted PI loop) then locks onto the satellite's clock from sparse, jittery photon hits, verified bit-exact against a fixed-point model. The multi-channel version runs 4 quantum channels plus sync on one time base.

STM32 development board: A two-layer STM32F103C8T6 board designed from scratch in KiCad 10: USB Micro-B input, AMS1117-3.3 LDO, 16 MHz crystal with sized load caps, per-pin decoupling, ferrite-filtered VDDA, and SWD, UART and I2C headers. All 32 parts placed against JLCPCB design rules.

Closed-loop vacuum process controller: STM32 pressure controller with PI control and anti-windup, split-range pump and bleed-valve actuation, interlocks and telemetry.

Hack computer: Von Neumann computer with CPU, RAM, ROM and I/O, built through Nand2Tetris.

VEX robot: High Stakes: Team 9651X: 450 RPM omni drive, two-stage intake, dual-hook mechanism and a PTO-driven 6-bar arm.

VEX robot: Over Under: 7-motor drive with catapult, hang mechanism, intake and outtake.

Quantum

QubeSat: Quantum key distribution from a 6U CubeSat to a ground station. On the bench we used Thorlabs polarizers, liquid crystal waveplates and laser diodes to run BB84 end to end: key sifting, QBER estimation and raw key generation, which set the encoder design and QBER budget for the mission.

Quantathon V2 Grand Champion: Youngest winner of the International Quantum Circuit championship round, which sent me to Abu Dhabi to represent Vanderbilt. We reformulated PCA around the outlier-resistant L1 norm, solved it with quantum annealing, and validated it on an IBM quantum computer, where it scaled better than classical L2 PCA as the number of stocks grew.

MIT iQuHACK: 11 quantum circuit compilation problems in the Clifford+T gate set, minimizing fault-tolerant cost.

Research

Ember: An extensible benchmark suite for quantum annealing embedding algorithms. Published and presented at IEEE Quantum Week 2026.

Radiation effects research: Undergraduate researcher in Dr. Bharat Bhuva's group, part of Vanderbilt's Radiation Effects and Reliability program, the largest university-based radiation-effects program in the world.

Information-optimal photonic test structures: Sidewall angle is the hardest silicon-photonics fabrication error to measure without cutting the wafer. I treated choosing test structures as an experiment-design problem: a full-vector mode solver gives each structure's sensitivity to width, thickness and sidewall angle, and a Fisher information matrix with its Cramér-Rao bound says how well those can be recovered. Today's structures sit on an almost flat 2-D sheet of that space; adding rib waveguides points into the empty direction, improving the worst-determined parameter about 570x and sidewall-angle precision 23 to 51x.

Gallium nitride for high-power semiconductors: Published first-author review on GaN as a replacement for silicon in high-power devices.

Deep learning × computational chemistry: UofT Clean Energy Lab: searching for the best molecule for electrochemical carbon capture.

Co-packaged optic chiplets: Memo on copper-hBN-aluminum chiplets to advance Moore's law, with UofT ECE researchers.

YBCO superconductors for wireless power: Lab and theory work on yttrium barium copper oxide for MIMO wireless power transfer and fusion.

Renewable diesel: Coupling gasification with solid oxide electrolysis so syngas and green hydrogen react into diesel.

Venture

Purple Hydrogen: Purple sulfur bacteria that eat hydrogen sulfide waste and give off hydrogen. An independent study at CREMCo Laboratories measured sustained headspace hydrogen above 1.17% by volume. Provisional patent filed in 2026, a paid pilot running on a live sour-gas stream, and three Mitacs research partnerships.

Lab-built prototype bioreactor: Two 300 mL photobioreactors at CREMCo Laboratories that produced the validated hydrogen result.

Hand-built first bioreactor: A cabinet turned into an 850 nm near-infrared photobioreactor.

Reviving cryo-frozen bacteria: Full lab process video reviving two purple sulfur bacteria strains.

Builds & hackathons

Cultura: Farming app for small-scale farmers. IRIS Prize and Ingenious+ winner, Buildspace top 32 of 17,000+.

BrAInstorm: Youngest-ever Hack the North winner at 14: a brain-computer interface turning brainwaves into art and music.

Digital twins for natural disasters: Proposal to CAE for synthetic environments that simulate disasters. Finalist, then worked with them after.

Chitosan bioplastic: World Affairs Conference sprint winner: a cheap, biodegradable plastic from crab and shrimp shell waste.

Crop-tracking IoT sensor: Queen's Prequel Hackathon winner: a sensor tracking over-fertilization and crop phenology on small farms.

Caloric content with XGBoost: Predicting the calories in Indian dishes from their nutrients with gradient-boosted trees, plus a write-up that explains the math behind them.

Collimator Podcast: Tech podcast with professors, industry experts and VCs. 2K listeners.

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