Q&A: How the IQMP is Capturing Student Interest in Quantum Technology

The University of Illinois has been the largest contributor of operating expenses up to this point, and that’s not a huge number for a big university research center because we are a lean organization executing operations on a really big capital project. This is a project that shows off the thought leadership of the region’s universities and the University of Illinois, and demonstrates their commitment to doing something innovative, creating public good and helping the state create jobs and opportunities. So, I think that they’ve made the decision that those few million in OPEX dollars are a good investment.

EDTECH: What quantum research advantages are they gaining?

JOHNSON: We’re really excited about what we’re doing from that point of view. I’ve been a faculty member at the University of Illinois for 25 years, working in quantum my whole career. The universities are the source of the technology and the basic science that has led to all of this. That’s really positioned us to do what we’re doing now. It’s exciting because we’re seeing exactly the thing that we talk about doing in academia, which is creating new knowledge and transferring that for the good of society.

Another exciting connection for the universities is creating opportunities for students; the companies coming to Chicago for the IQMP have already committed to hiring 1,000 people. There will be thousands more over the next few years. They’re principally excited to come here because of the number of students coming out of our programs and how well prepared they are to do what we want to do, and these companies can’t grow without them. This will create a lot more opportunities for students coming out of our programs, and the younger students just starting within our programs will have a whole pathway ahead of them. We’re also attracting a lot of international students, and this gives them an opportunity to enter an exciting industry that wasn’t here before.

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We have a number of programs within local universities relevant to the industry already, but some new programs are also springing up. A few years ago, the University of Chicago formalized the first quantum Ph.D. program in the country, well before we started the IQMP project. Other new programs include Chicago State University, one of the first in the state to implement a quantum certificate program, which students can add to their degrees. UIUC recently started a master’s degree in applied physics around instrumentation, which aligns well with some of the jobs in cryogenics we’re going to need in great numbers at the park. For many years, Fermilab has wanted to grow its cryogenics co-op program, and now it can through what we’re doing at IQMP.

There are also pathway programs that will move students from community college degrees into four-year STEM degrees to prepare them for the kinds of jobs that they might do at the park. Companies are really sitting up and taking notice, and in many cases these companies already have graduates from our programs on their teams, and they know they’re going to access more great employees if they grow here.

EDTECH: There are many benefits to this location, as far as access to researchers and students, but what about from the technology side?

JOHNSON: If you think about the very technical nature of the infrastructure, what’s needed is equivalent to a light manufacturing physical technology and the power required to operate that. It’s a significant amount of power, but it’s not on the scale of the big data centers popping up everywhere. We have a lot of access to power in Illinois, and a large fraction of it is carbon-neutral, which is attractive to many companies, including the one coming in from California. They wanted carbon-neutral power, and they can get it.

There are lots of technical requirements for the various kinds of physical hardware researchers are developing for quantum computing: You need low vibrations, stable air handling and a modest amount of processed water to do a lot of these things, but none of those are super exotic. Another important factor is having a concentration of the industries like the city of Chicago has, which offers a very diverse economy across finance, energy, insurance, logistics, transportation and material science. The quantum industry is excited to be proximal to that because it gives them a way to find customers with diverse needs.

The benefits the universities have in being near this concentration of industry are many. Students will have ready access to internships and long-term employment. Researchers have access to partnerships with these companies, and that’s already happening. We’re already seeing research partnerships growing between the universities and the companies coming here. We also expect to see faculty researchers accessing some of the equipment and infrastructure that’s being built out at the park, rather than building out their own expensive labs on their campuses. That’s a model that has been very effective for many years.

EDTECH: Does this mitigate some of the challenges or funding uncertainties higher education is seeing right now? Is this a replacement model, or has it always happened in this way to some extent?

JOHNSON: Over the past six or seven years, we saw some disruptions in the federal funding system and many of us were saying, from the point of view of the university research enterprise, that we needed to form more industry partnerships and access new ways to support research. The idea of translational research has actually been happening longer in the biomedical space than in other fields, but even when the federal funding landscape was very different, it was becoming clear that universities needed to diversify their research portfolios. The No. 1 place to do that was through industry partnerships.

We were working on IQMP before these disruptions to the federal funding pipeline, and maybe we were a little ahead of the times in terms of doubling down on strengthening those industry-academic partnerships. I do think, in this research area, this is a fantastic alternative for a new faculty member who, 10 years ago, might have been more focused on getting a grant from the National Science Foundation. Now, there’s an opportunity to commit to working with one of these companies to do cutting-edge research.

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EDTECH: How do you see IQMP’s mission evolving as quantum technologies evolve?

JOHNSON: Quantum computing is still very much a nascent technology. It’s hard to know where it will go. The rate that things have been advancing within this space over the past two years is just stunning, and we’re much closer to where we want to be than we were two years ago. But beyond computing, there are other sorts of quantum technologies being applied in communications and sensing. Many people would say that quantum sensing is already further along technologically and economically than quantum computing. All of the work in photonics that supports parts of the quantum industry and the technologies in cryogenics that are enabling for some quantum components are opportunities for IQMP, along with the connections to high-performance computing and hybrid computing technologies.

We will learn a lot of things in the projects already planned for IQMP that could lead to new directions in high-performance computing on the algorithm side and software side. Recent work in quantum algorithms has benefitted classical computing, which is seeing some quantum-inspired algorithms benefit older hardware platforms. It’s really hard to say what that will look like in five years.

EDTECH: Does artificial intelligence play any role here?

JOHNSON: Definitely, in a couple of ways. One, the advances in AI or the availability of AI is helping us accelerate the development of quantum computing because we’re making rapid progress in algorithms and circuit design and growing the quantum computing stack. In another sense, there are specific algorithms, quantum machine learning kinds of algorithms, that people are working on now to accelerate existing AI algorithms. Over time, this will hopefully make some of the things AI does now less energy-intensive. You’ll be able to solve the same problems faster, with less energy. That’s something we’re hopeful will be an important outcome of this work.

READ MORE: Higher ed can’t afford to wait on quantum security.

EDTECH: Where do you see the IQMP in 10 years?

JOHNSON: In 10 years, the physical space that we’re building is going to look like an amazing campus, and you can see it just as the first building is being completed. It’s going to be a great place for people to work. In five years, probably, there will be 1,000 people, at least, working at the park. This is a place that has been dormant for 35 years. Maybe 45 years ago, 10,000 people worked there, and there has been nothing for the past 35 years. So, we’ll see a return to that level of activity and energy and industry happening there, creating opportunities for that part of the city and the people in those neighborhoods. In 10 years, there will be an industry that will be bigger, growing quickly and attracting suppliers and end users and having an impact that goes way beyond just the park that we’re building. And we hope that when people around the world think about the quantum industry and quantum computing, they think of Chicago.

I just want to emphasize what a new thing this is. We’re not just making bigger computers. We’re not a branch of AI and we’re not a data center. It’s a very new thing and it’s natural for people to be curious and have questions and wonder. We take our role helping people understand what we’re doing here very seriously. That’s been a really fun part of the project, especially for the universities. This is what you want as a university researcher: to create something totally new and turn it into something that benefits the world, and we don’t truly see that too often. This feels like one of those cases.