Happy #WorldQuantumDay!

(April 13, 2023) It has been some time since I last wrote a director’s letter.  The eve of World Quantum Day is a great time to reflect on a pivotal year for national quantum policy. During this past year, the President signed two directives on quantum, and the White House Subcommittee on Quantum Information Science (QIS) augmented the national strategy with additional reports on the quantum workforce and for bringing quantum sensors out of the lab to the market. In addition, the United States signed six new bilateral quantum cooperation statements and launched a multilateral dialogue with twelve countries. The first major deliverable from the multilateral dialogue, the Entanglement Exchange, was released just a few months later. Congress passed major quantum-relevant legislation, like the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, and Federal Agencies continued to work together and engage with the U.S. QIS community. Additional highlights can be found below and in this year’s Annual Report of the NQI Program.

(February 16, 2023) The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has released two funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) related to STEM education, which could be leveraged by the quantum community.

(January 6, 2023) The National Quantum Initiative (NQI) Act became Public Law 115-368 in December 2018 to accelerate American leadership in quantum information science and technology. This is the third Annual Report on the NQI Program, as required by the NQI Act.

(December 19, 2022) Last Wednesday, the Department of Energy announced $4.6 Million in awards for the Advanced Scientific Computing Research – Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (ASCR-RENEW) program, whose goal is to increase participation of underrepresented groups in the quantum computing and networking workforce and to increase participation of underrepresented institutions in quantum computing and networking workforce training. This pilot program is intended to leverage ASCR’s unique national laboratory infrastructure and user facilities to provide training and research opportunities for students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty from underrepresented groups and at institutions that are currently underrepresented in the ASCR portfolio such as non-R1 institutions of higher education and minority serving institutions (MSIs), including Historically Black Colleges and Universities.