Lehigh University Becomes Newest Member of IBM Quantum Innovation Center at NC State

Membership grants Lehigh’s faculty and students access to IBM’s largest quantum computing systems for commercial use cases and fundamental research.

Lehigh University has joined the IBM Quantum Innovation Center at NC State University.

“Faculty and students of Lehigh’s Quantum Computing and Optimization Lab (QCOL), which is housed in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, are thrilled to start taking advantage of all the opportunities IBM Quantum Innovation Center membership offers,” says Tamás Terlaky, Lehigh’s quantum liaison, who serves as the George N. and Soteria Kledaras ’87 Endowed Chair Professor and director of QCOL in Lehigh’s P.C. Rosin College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Terlaky, whose research interests include high-performance optimization methods, optimization models, algorithms and software, says being a university member of the IBM Quantum Innovation Center will enable us to experiment with our novel quantum computing optimization methodologies in the frame of a major DARPA-funded project: “The Quantum Computing Revolution and Optimization: Challenges and Opportunities.” Further, access to the world’s most powerful quantum computers opens the door for a variety of research projects — across topic areas such as healthcare systems engineering, hybrid high-performance computing and financial engineering.

“We can’t wait to interact with Lehigh’s talented faculty and student researchers through our IBM Quantum Innovation Center,” says Dan Stancil, executive director of the IBM Quantum Innovation Center at NC State, as well as the Alcoa Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

NC State’s IBM Quantum Innovation Center — established in 2018, as the first university-based quantum computing hub in North America — is one of several IBM quantum computing hubs worldwide.

The global IBM Quantum Network is a collaboration between IBM and Fortune 500 companies, national research labs, startups, and leading universities to advance quantum computing and explore practical applications for science and business. Hubs have a unique role within the network — focused on advancing industry collaborations, learning, skill development and the implementation of quantum computing.

Membership in NC State’s IBM Quantum Innovation Center grants Lehigh access to IBM’s largest quantum computing systems for commercial use cases and fundamental research. The university’s faculty and students get the opportunity to develop and test new algorithms for quantum hardware, as well as collaborate with leading-edge experimental efforts to develop and test new capabilities. Lehigh’s students will also now receive unique educational opportunities; they’ll gain real-world experience in algorithm development and data analysis using state-of-the-art quantum information processors — and enter the workforce as quantum-ready graduates.

Lehigh, a private research university located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has over 7,200 undergraduate and graduate students; in the 2019-2020 academic year, nearly 1,500 undergraduates took part in research.

Quantum computing is a rapidly emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems too complex for classical computers, which has far-reaching potential for research.

To learn more about the NC State IBM Quantum Innovation Center, including how to join or request access as a faculty member or student, visit quantum.ncsu.edu.