Behind the scenes of NSF’s CIQC is a powerful story of workforce development: mathematicians without any prior exposure to quantum science are emerging as leaders in a rapidly expanding field, thanks to a training model that’s both rigorous and deeply interdisciplinary.
“I had never worked on quantum computation before 2019,” says Lin Lin, Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley and a core member of CIQC. “Now, former students and postdocs from our group are exiting UC Berkeley as assistant professors at top institutions. That kind of trajectory is rare—and exciting.”
Lin began exploring quantum computation driven by seed funding at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and inspiration from events at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He wasn’t alone. Two of his graduate students, Yu Tong and Dong An, took a leap into the unknown and soon distinguished themselves, earning UC Berkeley’s top departmental prize in applied mathematics, the Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics. Both are now assistant professors, Tong at Duke and An at Peking University.
Di Fang, a former Morrey Assistant Professor and Simons Quantum Postdoctoral Fellow, also became a highly visible leader in the CIQC community. Known for her research excellence and inspiring presence, Fang earned many awards, including campus-wide teaching awards before accepting a faculty position, also at Duke. She has also recently received the NSF CAREER award. “Multiple students told me she was a role model in our community,” Lin recalls. Another Simons Quantum Postdoctoral Fellow, Jin-Peng Liu, won the Alexander Prize for Graduate Research in Mathematics and is now an assistant professor in Tsinghua University.
The stories keep coming. Zhiyan Ding, currently a postdoc at Berkeley, arrived with no background in quantum computing, pivoting from AI research. Using Lin’s course materials—lecture notes from Quantum Algorithms for Scientific Computing, one of the first courses of its kind tailored for a mathematical audience—Ding taught himself the foundations of quantum science during his final Ph.D. year. Within months, he produced a breakthrough result published in PRX Quantum. This fall, he joins the University of Michigan as an assistant professor, helping build their quantum program from the ground up. Yulong Dong, a former student in mathematics jointly advised by Lin and Professor Birgitta Whaley, will also become an assistant professor at the University of Michigan next year.
“There’s real momentum here,” Lin says. “These researchers are going from zero to one hundred in just a few years. It’s happening because Berkeley, through CIQC, has built an environment where risk-taking and interdisciplinary exploration are supported.”