Kushal Seetharam*† and Michael DeMarco†
Edited by Shobhita Sundaram and Grant A. Knappe
Article | Aug. 30, 2021
*Email: kis@mit.edu
†These authors contributed equally
DOI: 10.38105/spr.lcbqcligt5
Highlights
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- A new generation of quantum technology is on the horizon which will enable innovation in a wide variety of scientific disciplines and industry sectors.
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- The maturity of quantum information science (QIS) has reached an inflection point, with government and industry increasingly investing in the field in the hopes of realizing its potential.
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- In order to effectively catalyze progress in QIS, we should build an adaptable workforce of scientists and engineers, which would endow this emerging innovation system with the resilience and flexibility it needs.
Article Summary
Given the growing hype and investment in quantum technology, it is important to understand its current landscape and how best to catalyze progress in QIS towards the eventual goal of societally-relevant innovation in materials, pharmaceuticals, industrial processes, cybersecurity and myriad other areas. We give a brief overview of the policy landscape of the emerging QIS innovation system. The most important requirement for
steady progress in QIS is a robust workforce. Here, we focus on one key slice of workforce development: the training of adaptable quantum scientists and engineers.
Quantum information science (QIS) is an emerging field
of science and technology that seeks to harness the
unique properties of quantum systems such as coherence,
entanglement, and measurement [1] for applications
in computing [2], sensing [3], and communication [4].
Progress in quantum computing is likely to have a
dramatic impact across different industries by facilitating
advances in optimization, artificial intelligence, cryptography,
chemistry, and material science by dramatically speeding
up certain computations that are intractable on even the
most powerful classical computers [5, 6]. For example, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer would help
elucidate the reaction mechanisms that bacteria use to
efficiently perform nitrogen-fixation, potentially enabling the
production of cheap ammonium [7, 8]; currently, 1-3% of
world energy use is spent on an inefficient approximation
to this process, with this resource use having serious
environmental and economical consequences [7, 9, 10].
Quantum computers would also allow insight into materials
such as high-temperature superconductors [8], which if
understood, would lead to technology that makes both fusion
energy and renewable sources like solar and wind much
more viable. Quantum-enhanced sensors, meanwhile, would
prove useful in myriad applications including precision timing
and navigation as well as medical imaging and biochemical
analysis [11]. Quantum communication protocols will alter
the modern cybersecurity landscape by enabling secure
communication and distributed computing [12].
Since its inception approximately forty years ago, QIS
has flourished in academic environments. The field is
now at an inflection point in maturity, with increasing
industry involvement seeking to progress R&D in order to
realize the innovations enabled by a new era of quantum
technology. Federal governments are also increasing their
investment in QIS as well attempting to establish a favorable
policy landscape [13]. While the nascent foundations of a
vibrant quantum ecosystem are starting to come together,
policymakers must be thoughtful about how they organize the
QIS innovation system so that the growing excitement and
funding translates into effective technological progress and the
capture of economic benefits from this emerging sector.
Many of the above technological applications become
feasible once a large, fault-tolerant quantum computer (FTQC)
exists. There is also reasonable scientific consensus that such
a computer will eventually be built. However, even optimistic
estimates place the arrival of such a machine at least 15-20
years away. Quantum-enhanced sensors are likely to achieve
technical readiness earlier, with quantum communication
maturing somewhere between sensing and computing. It
is highly uncertain, however, what the actual timelines
for quantum technologies to find practical applications are
and where the earliest applications will be [14]. It is
therefore crucial that the national QIS innovation ecosystem
is resilient enough to tolerate and break through unexpectedly
difficult engineering challenges that delay or halt certain
technological directions, while simultaneously being flexible enough to exploit the discovery of unexpected directions and
applications.
The long-term picture is complicated by the uncertainty
in which physical hardware platforms are most suitable
for different quantum technologies. For example, some of
the current contenders for physical systems to encode the
quantum bits (qubits) underlying quantum computers include
ions held in electric traps, superconducting circuits [15],
neutral atoms held in optical traps, and photons held in
cavities. The main challenge in developing a FTQC is to
balance the need for qubits to interact in order to perform an
actual computation and the fact that undesirable interactions
rapidly degrade the sensitive quantum information stored in
the qubits. Each of the above mentioned platforms have
different trade-offs in this regard, especially as one considers
scaling the system to the qubit numbers necessary to build a
FTQC. A fifth platform, the so-called topological qubits which
make heavy use of large-scale entanglement, promises to be
much more robust to the loss of quantum information, but the
physical realization of these systems has proved to be difficult.
In this paper, we consider the challenges in building a
capable new workforce for the American QIS ecosystem.
We first give an overview of the current US QIS policy
landscape and then discuss how resilience and flexibility
can be cultivated by increasing the cross-pollination between
universities, national labs, and industry firms which are
starting to settle into complementary R&D lanes, and relatedly
by engaging in workforce development at all levels. The
benefits of cross-polination explored in this work, however,
are only one part of building resilience; immigration policy,
equitable educational opportunities, consistent funding of
research, and the work-life balance of academic career paths
are a few of the many issues that should be addressed to truly
build a robust QIS workforce.
Figure 1: A selection of the governemental agencies involved in
the National Quantum Initiative Act and the research initiatives
they fund.
The QIS Innovation System
Policy Landscape
Quantum Information Science is unfolding across
universities, national laboratories, and private industry.
Underlying this tri-fold structure of quantum research is the
federal government, which funds universities and national
labs and determines research priorities. Civilian agency
funding is now poised to take off under the National Quantum
Initiative Act [16] (NQI Act), passed by Congress in 2018, with
broad bipartisan support to stimulate and develop American
QIS. Here we review the institutions created by the NQI Act
and their roles.
The NQI Act established the National Quantum Initiative,
a multi-agency program spanning the National Science
Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National
Institute of Standards and Technology to support research
and workforce development for QIS. It authorized $1.2B for
research spending and workforce development over five years
and established mechanisms to coordinate QIS research
across the federal agencies.
Overseeing NQI efforts is the National Quantum
Coordination Office (NQCO), which serves as the point of
contact for the NQI, promotes funding opportunities, conducts
public outreach, and continues to set priorities [14] (See
Figure 1). The NQCO director is appointed by the director of
the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Alongside the NQCO are two coordination committees: the
National Science and Technology Committee subcommittee
on QIS, which coordinates QIS research budgets across
federal agencies, assesses infrastructure requirements
(including workforce training), and establishes priorities;
and the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee,
comprised of representatives from industry, universities, and
federal labs which provides external input on the progress of
the NQI and trends in QIS.
Following the passage of the NQI Act, the aforementioned
National Science and Technology Committee released the
National Strategic Overview for QIS in 2018 [17], addressing
the actions needed to translate scientific progress in QIS
into a new industry. One of their key recommendations
was the development of public-private partnerships, in
particular by creating a Quantum Economic Development
Consortium (QED-C) which unites industry, academic, and
other stakeholders with support from multiple government
agencies. By identifying gaps in technology, standards,
and workforce development and addressing those gaps
collectively, QED-C aims to support the development of a
commercial QIS industry and supply chain in the U.S.
Working alongside the QED-C are a series of innovation
centers established to enhance collaboration between
universities and the national laboratories. The DOE has
established five new centers at major national laboratories,
each with a budget of $115M over five years:
- Q-NEXT (Argonne) will focus on materials fabrication and testbed development
- The Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (Brookhaven) will focus on improved material design for hardware and hardware-specific co-design of error-correction schemes and algorithms
- The Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center (Fermilab) will focus on improving coherence and quality of quantum technology
- The Quantum Science Center (Oak Ridge) will focus on topological materials, quantum algorithms, and sensors
- The Quantum Systems Accelerator (Lawrence Berkeley) will focus on improving hardware platforms as well as co-design of algorithms targeted towards scientific discovery
Additionally, the NSF has invested $75M in three
new Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes: one focusing
on sensing and entanglement distribution, led by
the University of Colorado; one focusing on hybrid
quantum-classical technology led by the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and one focused on the
development of large scale quantum computers and efficient
algorithms led by the University of California at Berkeley.
Systemic Challenges
A serious challenge facing QIS is the aforementioned
uncertainty in the trajectory of the industry: the final goal,
a FTQC, is likely to be a few decades away, and the
development of NISQ devices is still in progress. Many
applications of NISQs have yet to be discovered; on the other
hand, some of the expected applications will likely turn out
to be infeasible. Uncertainty is difficult for any industry, and it
will be doubly so for a developing ecosystem spread across
universities, national labs, and private companies like QIS.
The QIS community will need resiliency and robustness to
navigate the twisting course ahead.
The NSF and DOE innovation centers illustrate an
illuminating approach to this issue: developing a flexible,
well trained, and multidisciplinary workforce. As research
approaches succeed or fail, and as private companies rise
or fall, QIS will need a workforce that can smoothly transition
among universities, national laboratories, and private industry;
the researchers, technicians, and engineers working in QIS
will require fluency in multiple approaches to quantum
computing and multiple lanes of the industry.
With this in mind, we next take a deep dive into one of the
innovation centers and explore its strengths and weaknesses
from a workforce development point of view.
Case Study: Quantum Systems Accelerator
The Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA) is one of
the national QIS research centers created by the DOE in
accordance with the NQIA. It has been allocated $115M
in funding over five years with a mission centered on
co-designing quantum algorithms and quantum hardware
platforms in order to demonstrate a quantum advantage in
scientific applications. The network of members participating
in the center include national labs like Lawrence Berkeley,
Sandia, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory as well as universities
such as Berkeley, Caltech, Duke, Harvard, MIT, University
of Colorado Boulder, University of Maryland, and University
of Texas Austin. The center will also engage with industry
through, for example, activities involving QED-C member
companies.
Research at the center will encompass the three major
types of hardware platforms for programmable quantum
computing: superconducting circuits, trapped ions, and neutral
atoms. Projects will develop the engineering and control
necessary to mitigate errors and scale these platforms, while
simultaneously investigating hardware-tailored error-resistant
algorithms for scientific problems which may demonstrate
a practical quantum advantage compared to classical
computational methods. The center also intends to engage
in workforce development activities that help cultivate a future
pool of trained quantum scientists, engineers, and technicians.
The QSA provides a scaffold for coordinated R&D and
workforce development efforts in QIS, and centers like it have
the potential to act as a critical nexus of all three primary
actors in the innovation ecosystem: universities, national
labs, and industry firms. For example, the $115m of funding
in the center is partitioned into projects and distributed to
participating research groups in accordance to communal
discussions between members of the center.
There are two benefits to this disbursement compared to
grants originating directly from federal science agencies such
as the NSF, DOE, and DOD. Firstly, bigger projects involving
larger sums of money can be constructed amongst member
research groups compared to the smaller grants awarded
by federal agencies, which typically involve 1-3 principal
investigators. Secondly, the overall portfolio of projects funded
by the center must necessarily form a consistent picture which
generates progress on the specific QIS challenge that the
center focuses on. In the case of the QSA, this challenge is the
scaling of quantum hardware platforms and the co-design of
algorithms for scientific applications. Such a focus inevitably
generates a project portfolio that is both more targeted and
more interdisciplinary than those of federal science agencies,
which are typically organized around individual disciplines in
the physical sciences, life sciences, and engineering. Many
of the salient challenges in QIS require a ’connected science’
model to solve, where progress arises from a continuous
exchange between fundamental science and engineering and
at the intersection of different disciplines. The existence of
centers like the QSA which can support a portfolio of variably
sized projects that are thematically focused in a connected
science approach is thus highly beneficial to progress in QIS.
The research funding funneled through the centers like the
QSA supports graduate students at universities, scientific staff
at national labs, and research technicians, thereby directly
contributing to QIS workforce training and development.
However, the center has not put forth concrete plans which
sufficiently leverage its unique structure, that of a network of universities and national labs connected to an industry
consortium, to most effectively grow the adaptable scientific
workforce at the heart of a resilient and flexible QIS innovation
system.
Scientists and engineers develop adaptability by regularly
interfacing with colleagues from different lanes. For example,
researchers at universities and national labs collaborating
regularly develop an appreciation for the capabilities and
career paths in each type of institution, while conversations
between researchers and industry firms can grant the
former a high level perspective on which applications have
market demand and the latter a low level perspective on
how mature the technology is and where the scientific
challenges lie [18]. A workforce that has been trained to have
these different perspectives will be more fluid, moving more
easily between different actors in the innovation ecosystem
and thus facilitating the diffusion of ideas and technical
advances. Furthermore, interfacing with members of different
research institutions and industry firms lets scientists and
engineers develop an intuition for the goals and capabilities
of different actors, increasing the likelihood of communication
and collaboration between them. This communication and
collaboration is a critical part of the resiliency and flexibility
of the overall innovation system.
In the QSA, routine conversations between people
working in different research areas and institutions, as
well as between researchers and industry firms, seem to
primarily occur between principal investigators and lab heads
that form the decision body of the center. The structure
of the center, however, provides a great opportunity for
developing adaptability in the workforce by encouraging cross
exposure between the scientists and engineers carrying out
the research at different institutions, and between these
researchers and industry firms.
As an example of the possibilities to exploit the synergies
of the center, one can look to the local ecosystem set-up by
two of its members: MIT and Lincoln Laboratory. Principal
investigators working on engineering better superconducting
circuit and ion trap platforms for QIS applications have
created a ‘one-team’ model bridging researchers at both
institutions. Graduate students at the MIT main campus spend
more of their time on fundamental science and engineering
challenges while staff researchers and technicians at Lincoln
Laboratory spend more of their time on engineering and
fabrication challenges, leveraging the relative strengths of the
two locations. However, researchers at both places routinely
interface and collaborate with each other as if they were part
of a single unified research group. Additionally, MIT has its
own consortium of industry firms interested in QIS called
the Quantum Science and Engineering Consortium (QSEC).
Researchers at both MIT and Lincoln are encouraged to
have conversations with firms in QSEC, which provides
the researchers with a perspective on industry needs while
helping industry firms manage their expectations about the
maturity and challenges of emerging quantum technology.
This collaborative environment between a university, a
national lab, and industry allows the scientists and engineers
at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory to develop an adaptability that
will make them invaluable parts of the QIS innovation system
as they progress through their career.
Much of the success of the MIT-Lincoln environment
stems from their geographic proximity and the long history
connecting the two institutions. Themes underlying the
success of this environment should, however, be extracted
and applied where possible at the larger scale of the
geographically decentralized QSA and other similar centers
which are spiritually similar in their structure; just like the
MIT-Lincoln environment, these centers provide a scaffold for
collaborations between universities and national labs while
maintaining a connection to an industry consortium. For
example, when disbursing the center’s funding into different
projects, collaborations between researchers at universities
and national labs may be encouraged when sensible.
Additionally, a small component of the evaluation of a project’s
success could be to require researchers participating in the
project to present their results to researchers from other
groups in the center who were not part of the project. To
encourage communication between researchers and industry,
the center could find a relevant industry partner for each
funded project through QED-C. The industry partner would
not be required to fund any part of the research, but both the
firm and researchers could have periodic conversations that
provide context to each side. These relatively minor policies,
and others like them, would allow the QSA and similar centers
to catalyze the growth of an adaptable QIS workforce.
In summary, centers like the QSA provide a unique
opportunity to coordinate the activity of various research
groups within a common vision and thereby progress
long-term goals necessary to advance QIS. However, more
granular collaboration amongst members of the center and
targeted policies fostering collaboration and cross-pollination
are necessary to train the emerging QIS workforce. In
particular, collaboration will be essential in training the new
workforce to be adaptable enough to facilitate advances of
these same goals in the larger national QIS ecosystem.
Conclusions
The NSF and DOE research centers instigated by the NQI
provide a unique opportunity to develop adaptable scientists
and engineers, who are crucial to the formation of a resilient
and flexible QIS innovation system. However, researchers
specialized in QIS are just one part of the workforce
needed for this innovation system, and the recommendations
we have listed here should be understood in the broader
context of continuing government efforts to improve scientific
workforce training. Large, diffuse ecosystems often face
issues training and retaining talent, and the presence of similar
challenges affecting the entire American scientific enterprise
may be inferred from the prevalence of proposed legislation
enacting improved mentoring programs (1)-(3), harassment
prevention (4), and studying the mental health of students and
researchers (5).
Furthermore, policy approaches are only part of the
solution to these issues. A strong scientific ecosystem relies
on a collaborative culture, and where the culture of work
is involved, a soft-power approach is called for. Promoting
individuals cognizant of the structural challenges facing their
workforce and promoting a culture conducive to a growing,
healthy, and diverse workforce will be essential for the growth
of QIS.
We are witnessing the birth of an industry, and the first
truly quantum one at that. The beginnings of any industry are
necessarily chaotic, and the current morass of companies,
national laboratories, NSF joint centers, DOE centers, and
university labs reflect a robust start for the growing QIS
economy. The key to sustaining this growth will be developing
a talented and multidisciplinary workforce.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge useful conversations with Will Oliver, Patrick Lee, William Bonvillian, Douglas Natelson, and William Brinkman. This work is partially supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 1745302.
Citation
Seetharam, K. & and DeMarco, M. Catalyzing the quantum leap. MIT Science Policy Review 2, 26-30 (2021). https://doi.org/10.38105/spr.lcbqc1igt5.
Open Access
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Legislation Cited
(1) U.S. Congress. H.R.4483 (113th) STEM Mentoring and Inspiration Act of 2014. Introduced into Congress.
(2) U.S. Congress. H.R.5509/S.3583 (115th) Innovations in Mentoring, Training, and Apprenticeships Act. Passed by Congress.
(3) U.S. Congress. H.R.1665/S.737 (116th) Building Blocks of STEM Act. Introduced into Congress.
(4) U.S. Congress. H.R.36 (116th) Combating Sexual Harassment in Science Act of 2019. Introduced into Congress.
(5) U.S. Congress. H.R.1109/S.1122 (116th) Mental Health Services for Students Act of 2020. Introduced into Congress.
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