Operational Update
January 24, 2022
By Kimberly McGuire, C2QA Operations Leader
Kimberly McGuire
We successfully accomplished our goal of standing up C2QA and establishing the operational infrastructure in year one. With the operations team working hand-in-hand with the scientists to undergird research activities, Center members have a newfound synergy that is collaborative and sure to deliver impactful science in the new year.
To get us started, we are excited to welcome IBM, as of September 2021, as the Center’s first industrial partner. With the execution of this agreement, we’re happy to report a 100 percent success rate for getting all C2QA partners under contract in our first year. Plans to bring on University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and our first unfunded affiliate, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL), are underway.
At the tail end of 2021, operations team members hosted several significant events (Career Fair, Strategic Retreat, All-Hands Meeting) and focused on updating annual scientific goals. To find the most updated Center records, documents (i.e., FY22 Annual Plan and Research Roadmap), policies, and procedures, enrolled Center members can visit the C2QA - Home (SharePoint), which contains the latest information. If you are not an enrolled Center member and would like access, reach out to Donna Cusa (dcusa@bnl.gov).
Center leadership experienced several personnel transitions since August 2021, with Andrew Houck (former Deputy Director) taking on the role of Center Director, Kai-Mei Fu (lead PI from University of Washington/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), being appointed Deputy Director, and Kimberly McGuire officially taking on the role of Operations Manager. New sub-thrust leaders were appointed in the Materials thrust (Mingzhao Liu: Correlating Materials Analysis with Quantum Devices; and Steve Hulbert: New Materials Spectroscopy Tools and Probes). We added an additional principal investigator from Howard University (Sonya Smith: Specializing in cryogenic properties of materials) and four beamline scientists from BNL (Andrew Walter and Andi Barbour, specializing in synchrotron techniques and infra-red spectroscopy, respectively; and Kenneth Evans-Lutterodt and Eli Stavitski, specializing in hard x-ray scattering). We are excited to welcome our newest members.
January 2022 will be chock-full of operational activities. The first set of six semi-annual performance review meetings (constituting half of the sub-thrust teams) will take place with the remaining six meetings scheduled for July 2022. These meetings are intended to provide a forum to discuss how sub-thrust teams are progressing towards the mission to deliver a 10x improvement each in software optimization, underlying materials and device properties, and quantum error correction. Ending January’s exciting events will be the kick-off meeting for the rebooted XCITe team with Mark Ritter and Ike Chuang co-leading this initiative. All that C2QA will accomplish in 2022 remains to be seen!
For more information or questions on operational matters, contact c2qa-info@bnl.gov.
2022-19387 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
