Delaware State University joins a list of Historically Black Colleges and Universities joining IBM in?a quantum education and research initiative.
Delaware Public Media’s Nick Ciolino recently spoke DSU Professor of Physics and Engineering Gour Pati about this partnetship anmd how this connects with what's already happening at the university.
The IBM-HBCU Quantum Center was established last fall with the goal of developing a workforce in the growing field of quantum science, and increasing the number of Black students educated in that field.
“We need to build this workforce for the future,” said DSU Professor of Physics and Engineering Gour Pati. “Since it is advancing very fast in the near term, there will be a lot of job opportunities for students.”
10 new HBCUS, including DSU, are joining to make a total of 23 institutions sharing access to IBM quantum computers on the cloud.
This comes about four months after DSU received a $7.5 million grant from the Department of Defense to start its own Center of Excellence in Advanced Quantum Sensing.
Pati is director of that institute. He says access to the IBM cloud theough the IBM partnership allows students to learn quantum programming, which is different from the way traditional computers are programmed.
“They have a toolkit. So they have a particular type of program language the students have to learn when they want to do that quantum computing programming,” he said.
Pati says there are also discussions among DSU faculty to pursue collaborative research with IBM, but details are yet to be determined.
