hi my name is Amira Abbas and I'm a
researcher at the IBM team in Zurich in
Switzerland. In this series we talk to
really interesting researchers in
quantum computing doing very cool work.
welcome to SuperPosition!
This show is really exciting and
important to me for two reasons. So one
it gave me a reason to shower before 3
p.m. and, thank you for laughing Hannah
was a little bit delayed. OK and 2 is
also pretty important because I get to
talk to amazing people like the first
guest today. And before she introduces
herself and tells us a little bit about
her background I want to highlight some
stuff that I know she's too modest to
kind of talk about. So I was stalking
Hannah online for the last week and
found out that she has won so many
awards and accolades and fellowships and
scholarships for physics and chemistry
and all her work and I encourage it and
some of these awards are like the
Beckman scholarship Phyllis Miss J
Fleming prize, correct me if I'm wrong please
and she's also won the horton Halliwell
graduate fellowship and I think the
coolest one is she's a department of
energy computational science graduate
this is really very prestigious PhD
fellowship to get so and also for those
of you who know Ellen s4 and they are
known for like really really good
research in quantum computing and
amazing people tennis about yourself and
you know how did you get into quantum
computing?
Yeah thanks so much for having me. My name is Hannah but I also go by Sukin in
papers as well but you know most people
call me Hannah. I'm currently a fourth
year graduate student and professor
Alana's food music's group
he was formerly at Harvard University
but now he's at least then University of
Toronto and as an affiliate of the
vector Institute so I guess I guess in
terms of how I got into quantum
computing I actually didn't know
anything about quantum computing until
maybe
the end of my junior year in college
where I was just sitting around in a
library and looking at some popular
science articles because I was kind of
bored while studying for midterms or
something and then I came across and an
article that described the potential
applications of this new field called
quantum computing so I think I was
really drawn in to this article and I
was like ah I I want to know more about
it so I started looking up online
resources and kind of fortunately it's a
little weird but that's also around the
time where I met Alon my advisor at a
scientific conference and then he was
telling me about his research and I was
really interested in that so I started
reading up his research and started
getting in touch with him and his group
to find out more about it and eventually
a couple of years later I landed in this
group and that's where I started kind of
learning from older postdocs and grad
students and trying to help out in
different quantum computing projects but
you have a little bit of a different
background I mean you started in your
undergraduate degree in chemistry and
then you also had and multiple labs and
I think you also interned at quantum
computing startup yeah so I guess this
actually goes back to on high school
because I was taking a lot of these
chemistry courses and then I think this
was the senior year of my high school
where I was kind of reading the textbook
which is pretty rare sometimes I would
skip reading some textbooks because I
would fall asleep but there was one
particular passage that was on this
field called a computational chemistry
just kind of this idea of integrating
ideas from chemistry as well as kind of
applying computational methods in order
to study chemistry and for me that
sounded super interesting so I I kind of
told myself hey like when I'm in college
I really want to try doing research in
this field called computational
chemistry so when I got to college I was
only looking for these computational
apps and
then I found my undergrad advisor Donald
VL mark at Wellesley College and he does
a lot of research studying antimicrobial
peptides so I wasn't so knowledgeable
and maybe like the five biophysical size
of things or the more biological aspects
of his research but I was really
interested in using both computational
and experimental methods in order to
study certain types of antimicrobial
peptides
so that was my undergraduate thesis but
then I think in terms of I mentioned
that I started it off as a chemistry
major but I think around two years into
my college I kind of had this weird
crisis where I'm like like is this what
I really want to do and I soon realized
that you know within chemistry I really
enjoyed studying chemical systems from
kind of physical perspective and also
applying computational methods to study
these systems so I think I was like
looking up a lot of these computational
methods and I was always trying to
implement like simple models that I've
seen in papers by myself just refine and
I guess quantum computing was like the
perfect field and that right it's highly
interdisciplinary so it kind of combines
all these subjects I was already
interested in and is trying to build
something that could really change they
change the world so would you say that
you had like this aha moment of
researchers in the space have this right
so he as well like I was in machine
learning and Finance and all these other
things but it never really clicked that
like the thing I wanted to do was
computing until I found it yeah yeah I
guess so
ah yeah it's worth to say cuz like right
like reading a single article shouldn't
be that in fact full but it was for me
at least because it was so new but just
like having to fit all of my interests I
have a little bit of a strange question
to ask you and I think it's a nice
icebreaker so let's imagine a
hypothetical situation where we could
inject all these
weird nonlinearities into quantum
mechanics and somehow create a time
machine alright so we magically create a
time machine and you Hannah are chosen
or you're the one person that can use
this time machine and travel back in
time so by the way the reason that I
asked this question is because when I
was stalking you I also found out that
you like history so if you could chuck
in time to any historical moment or
event and change it which would it be
why oh yeah this is a really good
question but in some sense I always have
like I know this hypothetical by right
so many of these like sci-fi novels
we're going back in time I always screws
up something so I'm like like afraid to
say like what I would change in history
because it's going to kind of all the
changes are going to propagate and maybe
like the world today is a way yeah and
like of course like you know the world
that we live in isn't perfect but it
could always go wrong or go in a worse
way so it's hard to like pick one thing
that I would change yeah maybe it's a
little bit more philosophical but for me
it's like I I don't think about like
regretting something in the past or like
necessarily changing something in the
past but rather like what can I do
better today for tomorrow so maybe it
doesn't height answer your question but
no it's beautiful uncertainty it's much
better than when I asked my niece this
and she asked me what my response was I
said I would go back five years ago and
buy Bitcoin so you're a way better
person
that's a smarter answer that's more
practical thanks for watching
superposition please feel free to let us
know if you have any topics in mind in
the comments or any suggestions about
things that you'd like to see in future
episodes and don't forget to subscribe
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