My research sits at the intersection of digital infrastructure, strategic competition, and network governance. I study how emerging technologies are built, who gains authority over their design, and how technical systems become sites of political power, security risk, and institutional control. Across quantum technologies, cloud architectures, AI, and internet governance, I am interested in the relationship between infrastructures and the actors who shape them.
Research areas
Much of the public and policy conversation around quantum technologies still trades in promises, abstractions, and strategic hype. My work in this area asks a more grounded question: how does quantum security actually work once it is embedded in real infrastructures, institutions, and geopolitical competition? I examine how the design, early deployment, and governance of quantum computing and quantum communication systems are shaped by the strategic interests of states, multinational firms, and international organisations.
Methodologically, this strand combines threat modelling, network and graph theory, publication analysis, and patent analysis to trace collaboration patterns, knowledge flows, and strategic alignment across the emerging quantum ecosystem. It focuses in particular on how standards, national initiatives, and economic incentives shape technical trajectories, and on where security claims outrun the institutional and infrastructural conditions needed to make them credible. In other words, this is work on quantum security by a self-proclaimed quantum enthusiast who has discarded the marketing brochures.
Selected current work
A second strand of my research examines the quantum internet as a political and infrastructural project. The quantum internet is often presented as a privacy-enhancing and decentralising upgrade to digital communication, promising new forms of secure networking, distributed computation, and blind quantum cloud computing. Yet many of its most prominent developers are the very actors already dominant in cloud infrastructure. That tension sits at the centre of this research.
I study how cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are becoming embedded in the research networks, institutional partnerships, and governance arrangements that shape quantum communication infrastructures. The larger question is not only who builds the quantum internet, but what follows politically when the future of secure communication is routed through firms already positioned at critical chokepoints of digital infrastructure. This work connects questions of privacy, dependence, platform power, and strategic competition to the technical evolution of internet architecture itself.
Selected current work
A third strand investigates emerging technologies not primarily as capability, but as strategic instrument. Here I am interested in the ways technological systems are used to signal ambition, organise state capacity, shape elite perception, and reorder competition before their capabilities are fully mature. This includes work on strategic stability, anticipatory governance, and the narrative construction of technological power.
One part of this research develops a framework for understanding how actual technical capability interacts with beliefs about capability. Another examines comparative national quantum strategies as documents of aspiration, signalling, and governance: not just roadmaps for research funding, but attempts to align domestic actors, position states internationally, and narrate technological relevance into being. Across both lines of work, the common concern is how emerging technologies acquire political force before they become settled technical facts.
Selected current work
Alongside my work on digital infrastructure and strategic competition, I maintain a second cluster of interests in philosophy of science, the aesthetics of computing, and the intellectual history of Theodor W. Adorno. This is where I get to ask questions about machines, rationality, technical systems, and modernity in a different register. The connection to my other research is on a meta-level: I am interested not only in who builds infrastructures, but also in how we learn to see, narrate, and critique them.
This section collects projects that sit slightly to one side of my main empirical research agenda while still speaking to broader concerns about technology, knowledge, and social order. It includes work on Adorno, the aesthetics of computer science, and adjacent empirical projects that do not neatly fit the three core strands above but remain part of the wider intellectual picture.
Selected current work