An inaugural cohort of students join quantum research labs around the Midwest through the Open Quantum InitiativeOpen Quantum Initiative
Through a 10-week residential research program called the Open Quantum Initiative (OQI) Undergraduate Fellowship, a dozen undergraduates from colleges and universities across the country will expand their understanding of QISE as well as connect with leaders in academia and industry.
“The more people of different backgrounds you have, the more ideas you have,” said Dr. Katherine Harmon, the Maria Goeppert Mayer Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and one of the early-career quantum researchers who helped bring this initiative to life. “And with new ideas coming in, you find new approaches to solve problems that I might not even be aware of. It benefits all of us.”
STEM fields, especially in computing and engineering, continue to suffer from a lack of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, Black and Hispanic communities remain particularly underrepresented in the STEM workforce. Yet almost 70% of the OQI fellowship students identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Black. And nearly half are first-generation students. Women also make up half of the cohort.
“This will be my first formal opportunity to go deeper into quantum computing, which I’ve had an interest in for a while,” said Ariadna Fernandez, a senior and computer science major at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) as well as one of the cohort members. “Because this field is so early, it can be hard to find these opportunities to explore it.”
Quantum science and engineering is still years away from full-scale commercial deployment. But it holds the potential to tackle big problems that were previously near-impossible to solve—and to do so quickly. Drug discovery could also become a lot faster and more precise. As this field takes off, researchers like Harmon are eager to make sure it is inclusive.
“Most of us in the cohort didn’t follow the traditional university roadmap,” said Fernandez, who spoke about how she transferred to UIC after going to a community college to save money. “We all had roadblocks along the way. Some of us, for example, took gap semesters in between community college and university for different reasons. And sometimes when you want to get into these fields like quantum computing, it can be hard to do that if you don’t follow specific pathways. I appreciate that we’re still given this great opportunity.”
