How HBCU Students and Researchers Have Made Qiskit Even Better
By Kayla Lee, Product Manager — Community Partnerships, IBM Quantum & Qiskit
This week, we announced the IBM-HBCU Quantum Center, a multi-year investment from IBM Quantum to build and develop talent at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The program will provide thirteen HBCUs access to IBM quantum computers via the cloud, educational support for students learning to use the Qiskit open source software development framework, and funding for undergraduate and graduate research. As a graduate of an HBCU and a member of the IBM Quantum & Qiskit Community team, I’m excited to see these two worlds collide in a formal collaboration.
Looking back at my time at Hampton University, a small HBCU in southeastern Virginia, critical factors to my success were undergraduate research opportunities, incredible mentors, and a supportive community. I still work closely with my mentor, a professor that recommended me for an undergraduate research program in Cambridge, MA that ultimately led to my PhD at Harvard University. As we kick-off this collaboration, I hope to create similar pathways and opportunities for other students in quantum computing.
The Black Community is underrepresented in STEM disciplines, and this carries over to — and is sometimes magnified in — new tech fields like quantum computing. Given the statistics, this is an opportunity to be different and intentional about the future we are building and the kind of quantum community we create. I’m excited to work with faculty and students at HBCUs to build a strong and diverse quantum computing community. After all, representatives from HBCUs have already participated in and made important contributions to the Qiskit community, even just this past summer.
Dr. Thomas Searles is a Martin Luther King Visiting Professor at MIT and an Associate Professor of Physics at Howard University, where he is co-teaching a course in Modern Physics where students will spend a third of the course learning quantum computation with Qiskit. Due to COVID-19, the research in his lab group was put on hold without access to the cleanroom or laser laboratory. Once Dr. Searles realized that IBM offered real quantum hardware to program over the IBM cloud, half of his group transitioned to Qiskit-related projects and even formed new research collaborations.
Bringing together this network of HBCUs is bigger than Dr. Searles alone, he said. He hopes to work with students to build necessary skills for graduate school, develop the quantum workforce, and build a sense of community. He commented that there was little participation of HBCUs in the recently-announced National QIS Centers, which is not representative of the diverse backgrounds contributing to the field. This center “will allow us to highlight the work of Black students and faculty and more importantly, give HBCUs the capacity to access and contribute to a more diverse, quantum-smart workforce garnering interest in students for years to come,” he said.
Others are excited about how the professional and research opportunities that this will bring. Chan Kyaw is a graduate student at Howard University focused on modelling and experimental fabrication and characterization of electromagnetic responses and quantum phenomenon in tetrahertz photon devices. In addition to conducting research using Qiskit, Kyaw participated in the Qiskit Global Summer School. For him, the center offers the chance to work directly with IBM Researchers and learn more about careers at IBM Quantum. Though he’s a new Qiskitter, one of his main goals is to produce consistent quantum mechanical models on real quantum hardware for classical phenomena, like strong coupling and quadrupole resonances in a photonic device. In addition, he and his peers are exploring engaging ways to interact with Qiskit with decision-based quantum games.
Still others are excited about the collaboration that can come from working with IBM. Khalil Guy is a mathematics and physics joint major at Fisk University, a small liberal arts school and HBCU in Nashville, Tennessee. Guy participated in the Qiskit Community Summer Jam earlier this year at the encouragement of his supervisor during a summer internship at Fermilab, and was excited about how the experience gave him a feel for quantum computing and the seeds of a project he can develop later.
Guy was most excited about the prospect of connecting with faculty across universities, and to take on projects with mentorship from professors at other institutions. Perhaps the effort will springboard him into other opportunities in the quantum ecosystem — and will benefit students and researchers at HBCUs overall. “I think that this is closing a gap in HBCU access to quantum technology and research,” he said. “Bringing HBCUs into the mix only increases the innovation that can take place among the faculty and at the universities involved as quantum technologies develop.”
For me, this is only just the beginning. IBM Quantum and the Qiskit Community team have done something extremely special by making real quantum hardware available on the cloud and providing no charge resources for anyone to get started. I’m excited to see the impact that the IBM-HBCU Quantum Center can have in nurturing the next generation of Black quantum scientists and engineers. Join the community here.
