The Boeing Quantum Creators Prize recognizes early-career researchers for work that moves the field of quantum information science and engineering in new directions. The program began in 2021 and expanded in 2023 thanks to a commitment from Boeing. Prize awardees participate in the annual Quantum Creators Prize Symposium, receive a monetary honorarium, a certificate, and reimbursed travel to the annual Chicago Quantum Summit.
The 2024 Quantum Creators Prize Symposium was held as part of the Chicago Quantum Summit on October 21 – 22, 2024.
Watch videos from the 2024 Boeing Quantum Creators Prize Symposium:
- Part 1, Atoms: Hannah Manetsch, Avikar Periwal, Chengyi Luo, and Aziza Suleymanzade
- Part 2, Condensed Matter: Thomas Werkmeister, Sara Murciano, and Patrick Ledwith
- Part 3, Quantum Information Protocols: Yuxin Wang, Senrui Chen
Hannah Manetsch
Role: PhD Student
Institution: California Institute of Technology
Bio: Hannah Manetsch is a fifth-year graduate student in the group of Manuel Endres at Caltech. Her PhD work has focused on scaling qubit numbers of single atoms in optical tweezer arrays for quantum computing applications. She did her undergraduate in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Avikar Periwal
Role: PhD Student
Institution: Stanford University
Bio: Avikar Periwal recently received his PhD from Stanford University, where he worked in the group of Monika Schleier-Smith on controlling nonlocal cavity-mediated interactions between atoms. He is now a postdoc at Harvard, working in the groups of John Doyle and Kang-Kuen Ni to harness the rich internal structure of molecules.
Chengyi Luo
Role: Postdoc
Institution: California Institute of Technology
Bio: Chengyi Luo is an AWS Quantum postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology working with Andrei Faraon. He received his PhD from JILA/University of Colorado, Boulder supervised by James K. Thompson. His research interest involves different cavity-QED systems, from matter waves in a Fabry-Perot cavity to rare-earth ions in nano-photonic resonators.
Aziza Suleymanzade
Role: Postdoc
Institution: Harvard University
Bio: Aziza is an experimental physicist working on hybrid quantum systems with Rydberg atoms, superconducting circuits, and diamond nanophotonics, currently in the Lukin Group at Harvard. Her interests include novel quantum interfaces and the generation of entangled resources across different platforms for quantum processing, communication, and sensing.
Thomas Werkmeister
Role: PhD Student
Institution: Harvard University
Thomas Werkmeister is a PhD candidate in Applied Physics at Harvard University, advised by Philip Kim. He creates and studies electronic devices to probe emergent quantum transport phenomena, in particular anyons in fractional quantum Hall states and topological superconductors.
Sara Murciano
Role: Postdoc
Institution: California Institute of Technology
Bio: Sara Murciano is a Burke postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. Her research interests explore how entanglement can help the understanding of non-trivial quantum phenomena involving symmetries in many-body systems, measurement-induced features, and non-equilibrium quantum dynamics. She earned her PhD at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste in 2022.
Patrick Ledwith
Role: PhD Student
Institution: Harvard University
Bio: Patrick Ledwith is a graduate student with Ashvin Vishwanath at Harvard University. He has worked on a variety of quantum phases within moiré materials. A highlight of his work is the prediction of fractional Chern insulators in magic angle twisted bilayer graphene and its extensions to other moiré systems.
Xiao Xue
Role: Postdoc
Institution: Delft University of Technology
Bio: Xiao Xue is a postdoc at QuTech at the Delft University of Technology, leading a National Growth Fund within the Quantum Delta Program. He received his BSc from the International College of University of Science and Technology of China and his PhD cum laude in TU Delft, supervised by Lieven Vandersypen. His research focuses on quantum information processing with spin qubits in silicon quantum dots.
Yuxin Wang
Role: Postdoc
Institution: University of Maryland, College Park
Bio: Yuxin Wang is a Quantum Information and Computer Science Hartree Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on the theory of noise and dissipation in quantum systems and their implications for quantum information processing applications. She obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago, working with Aashish Clerk.
Senrui Chen
Role: PhD Student
Institution: University of Chicago
Bio: Senrui Chen is a graduate student at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering in the University of Chicago, advised by Liang Jiang. He is broadly interested in the theory of quantum information and computation. He has been working on quantum learning theory, quantum noise characterization, and quantum error mitigation.
View Previous winners
- 2023 Boeing Quantum Creators Prize Winners
- 2022 Boeing Quantum Creators Prize Winners
- 2021 Boeing Quantum Creators Prize Winners
Questions can be directed to quantum@uchicago.edu.