People
QAI Team
Our team consists of experts in industry, academia, and government, all with an aligned goal of harnessing BC's quantum computing ecosystem.
Board of Directors
Affiliate Fellows

Daria Ahrensmeier
Daria obtained her PhD in theoretical particle physics from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and started specializing in physics education and educational development while doing postdoctoral work in non-equilibrium quantum field theory and adiabatic quantum computing.
She (co-)created and taught lecture courses, labs, studio physics materials and tutorials for students in physics, engineering, mathematics and other programs at universities in Canada and Germany. As collaborator or co-PI on several Teaching and Learning Development Grants, she has studied the effectiveness of those instructional designs and shared the findings in publications and at conferences. As an educational developer, Daria worked with over a hundred faculty members across SFU on curriculum review, program development, and teaching best practices, and collaborated on institution-wide teaching and learning initiatives.
Daria is a Teaching Faculty Member in the Department of Physics at Simon Fraser University. She is also the Chair of the Division of Physics Education (DPE) at CAP (Canadian Association of Physicists) and an Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Physics. For Quantum BC, she serves as the Chair of the Education Committee and has been collaborating on the development, implementation and assessment of workshops and courses. As an Affiliate Member of the Quantum Algorithms Institute, she is looking forward to further advancing Quantum Education and Training in BC and beyond.

Rogério de Sousa
I am a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Victoria. My research group focuses on how to design quantum hardware and software with less noise. We are implementing quantum algorithms in the current generation of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices (NISQ), and developing methods to benchmark as well as mitigate the impact of noise in them.
I am also interested in making quantum theory more accessible to people with different expertise. At UVic I teach the course "Introductory Quantum Computing" which is targeted at second-year science and engineering students with no previous exposure to quantum theory.

Olivia Di Matteo
Olivia Di Matteo joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UBC as an Assistant Professor in January 2022. She obtained her PhD at the University of Waterloo and Institute for Quantum Computing in 2019 in Physics (Quantum Information). Following her PhD, she worked as a Quantum Information Science Associate at TRIUMF, and subsequently as a Quantum Computing Educator and Researcher at the Toronto-based quantum startup Xanadu. Her research interests in quantum computing include compilation, circuits and algorithms; tomography and characterization; open-source quantum software; and education.

Matt Amy
Matt Amy is an Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He received his BMath, MMath, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, after which he held an Atlantic Association for Research in Mathematical Sciences (AARMS) postdoctoral fellowship in Mathematics at Dalhousie University. Matt has made several important contributions to the field of quantum circuit optimization through the phase polynomial method and associated algorithms, widely used in both academia and industry, as well as the development and application of formal methods to the verification of quantum software. Alongside his work in academia, Matt has spent time working in the quantum software industry at companies including Microsoft, Xanadu, and SoftwareQ, the latter at which he developed the industry-leading quantum compiler, staq, and now serves as head of quantum software.

Hausi A Müller
Hausi A. Müller is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria. He was Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Engineering (2009-2019). He is Co-Chair of the IEEE Future Directions Quantum Initiative. He is the founder and Steering Committee Chair of IEEE Quantum Week, the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing & Engineering (QCE). He was General Chair of QCE20 & QCE21 and Workshops & Finance Chair for QCE22. He was Vice President of IEEE Computer Society (CS) Technical and Conferences Activities (T&C) Board (2016–2018), member of the CS Board of Governors (2015–2017), and chair of the CS Technical Council on Software Engineering (2011-2015). With his research group, he collaborates extensively with industry as an international expert in quantum computing, software engineering, software evolution, adaptive systems, and intelligent cyber-physical systems. He was a principal investigator of an IBM CAS Project on Quantum Problem Solving and Algorithm Design. He is a principal investigator of two NSERC Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) grants on Quantum Computing and Dependable Internet-of-Things Applications (DITA), respectively. As part of the British Columbia Quantum Ecosystem, he teaches a graduate-undergraduate course on Quantum Algorithms and Software Engineering. He regularly gives invited presentations and keynotes on hybrid quantum-classical algorithms and engineering.

Kero Lau
I am an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University and a Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information Science. As a theoretical physicist, I enjoy the flexibility to admire and study the multiplex wonders of quantum science and technology. The current research interest of my research group lies on the boundary of quantum physics and information theory. Specific topics that we are interested include:
- Studying the properties of engineered quantum systems (trapped ions, photonics, optomechanics, spin ensemble, etc), in order to devise strategies to improve their performance when implementing quantum technological applications
- Developing quantum information applications (e.g. computing, sensing) that utilize the advantages of bosonic (harmonic-oscillator-like, continuous-variable) systems
- Understanding the fundamental and practical limitations of quantum applications, and exploring realization with near-term quantum devices.

Irina Paci
Dr. Irina Paci is a professor of chemistry at the University of Victoria. She grew up and completed her BSc in Chemistry in Iasi, Romania. She moved to Queen's University in Kingston, ON for her PhD studies on the use of integral equation theories, a mean-field approach for studying local structure in liquids. After a 3-year postdoc at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, USA, developing methods for computational studies of nanostructured materials, she moved to Victoria in 2007. Her teaching and research interests are in the area of physical and theoretical chemistry. Specific courses include introductory physical chemistry, quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics and computational chemistry. Dr. Paci’s research group develops and uses multi-scale theoretical and computational methods to understand fundamental aspects of the self-assembly of molecular materials and to investigate their properties. In the quantum field, Dr. Paci's group works to understand how quantum computers can be used, in hybrid simulations, to more accurately compute competing mechanisms in chemical reactions.

Prashant Nair
Prashant Nair is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where he advises an excellent group of students at the “Systems and Architectures (STAR) Lab”. Prior to joining UBC, he investigated practical data compression for IBM systems at T.J. Watson Research Center at New York. Dr. Nair’s work on integrating On-Die ECC and Host ECC has been successfully integrated into the HBM3 memory protocol by JEDEC – thereby improving the reliability of millions of memory devices.
Dr. Nair's interests are in the system-level and architecture-level optimization to enable efficient and practical quantum computers. He is also broadly interested in the areas of reliability, security, and performance-power efficient systems. He frequently publishes in several top-tier conferences computer science like ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, VLDB, DSN, and ASPLOS.

Ulrike Stege
Ulrike Stege is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria. She received a diploma in Mathematics from Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg i.Br., Germany, and a doctorate from ETH Zürich, Switzerland. She was Computer Science Department Chair at the University of Victoria from 2014-2018. She is a co-founder and co-director of HighTechU, an innovative learning community for high-school-aged youth with focus on building professional skills, and exploring career pathways related to technology; part HighTechU’s portfolio is the designing and offering of youth workshops in quantum computing. She teaches a graduate & 4th-year course on quantum algorithms and software engineering. With her graduate students she works in the areas of algorithm development with focus on parameterized complexity, quantum computing with focus on hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, bioinformatics and cognitive psychology. She is a principal investigator IBM CAS Project on Quantum Problem Solving and Algorithm Design. Ulrike was co-chair of the Technical Paper Track on Quantum Workforce & Society, as well as Posters Chair of IEEE Quantum Week 2021. She also co-organized quantum computing workshops for youth at IEEE Quantum Week 2020 & 2021, and a co-chair of the CASCON 2020 and CASCON 2021 Workshops on Quantum Computing.

Andrew C Potter
Andrew Potter is a theoretical physicist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Quantum Matter Institute at UBC, researching the intersection of quantum- materials, dynamics, information theory, and computation. His research focuses on understanding quantum materials and dynamics through the lens of quantum information theory, and through quantum simulation. In addition to conducting fundamental theory research, Potter’s group collaborates closely with experimental groups and industry partners developing quantum computing technology. Prior to joining UBC in August 2020, Andrew received his PhD in physics from MIT, was a Gordon and Betty Moore postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, an assistant professor of physics at UT Austin, and worked as a research scientist in the trapped-ion quantum processor theory, architecture, and algorithms group at Honeywell (now “Quantinuum”).
Researchers

Brett Henderson
Brett is a PhD student in computational chemistry at the University of Victoria, studying materials for energy storage and delivery. At QAI, he investigates how hybrid quantum-classical algorithms can be used to study the catalysts used in hydrogen fuel cells for increased accuracy and efficiency relative to purely classical approaches.

Riley Nerem
Riley is a Master’s student studying quantum algorithms at the University of Calgary’s Institute for Quantum Science and Technology. His latest research is divided between understanding the implications of quantum algorithms to other fields (e.g. biology, cryptocurrency) and computational complexity questions related to quantum spectral transformations. His focus at QAI is on evaluating the applicability of quantum search algorithms to computational problems arising in industry.

Sofia Donnecke
Sofia is currently in the fourth year of her PhD. Her research involves modelling organometallic catalysts and reactions at the surface to understand and improve chemical processes that are important to industry applications. Sofia’s research with QAI intends to bridge the gap between conventional computational chemistry methods and quantum algorithms. Using a combination of classical and quantum-based software, Sofia is investigating how to improve the performance of catalysts in hydrogen fuel cells.

Archita Adluri
Archita is a PhD candidate in chemistry at the University of Victoria, where she is working on simulation and ‘quantum’ properties of nano-materials for energy storage. Along with other interns at QAI, Archita will be investigating the future of quantum computing for materials advances and comparing it to current classical methods.