Announcements

The National Science Foundation has awarded Giannis (Yanni) Mpourmpakis $354,954 to continue his research into a promising but poorly understood method of creating olefins. Olefins, simple compounds of hydrogen and carbon, serve as the building blocks in chemical industry and are important for the synthesis of materials, including polymers, plastics and more. However, creating them can be problematic: it requires the use of fossil fuels, energy intensive “cracking” facilities, and limited production control. The team in Dr. Mpourmpakis’s CANELa lab will use computational modeling and machine learning to understand how the dehydrogenation of alkanes takes place on metal oxides, and use that knowledge to screen a wide range of metal oxides and their properties for use in the process.

Congratulations Dr. Mpourmpakis!

PQI organized its 3rd Quantum Day on Friday, April 12, 2019 for the students of Taylor Allderdice High School; a day full of activities, talks, lab tours, and of course pizza. About 20 students, mostly juniors and seniors, from Dr. Janet Waldeck's physics classes arrived early that day at the 321 Allen Hall, where they were greeted by PQI Director Jeremy Levy.

The Department of Physics at New York University, jointly with the Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) of the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute, invites applications for a position in the general area of theoretical/computational quantum condensed matter and atomic molecular and optical physics. The position is a 50-50 joint appointment between New York University and CCQ, with the appointee spending half of her or his effort in each place. At NYU the opening is at the tenure track Assistant Professor level and, at CCQ, it is at the Associate Research Scientist level.

Congratulations to the Science2018 Poster Award Winners!

Yasemin Basdogan (Keith group, Pitt Chemical and Petroleum Engineering), Xi Cao (Hatridge Group, Pitt Physics), Tejal Sawant (McKone Group, Pitt Chemical and Petroleum Engineering), Dengyu Yang (Levy Group, Pitt Physics), Amanda Dumi (Jordan Group, Pitt Chemistry), Matthew Grasinger (Dayal Group, CMU Civil and Environmental Engineering) won the poster awards ($1,000 travel award plus Echo Dot or Google Home mini).

Scott Crawford (Millstone Group, Pitt Chemistry), Lu Chen (Levy Group, Pitt Physics), Xing Yee Gan (Millstone group, Pitt Chemistry), Jierui Liang (Fullerton group, Pitt Chmemical and Petroleum Engineering) won the veteran awards (choice of Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home mini).

PQI undergraduate students Phillip Shenk (Levy group, Pitt Physics) won the best undergraduate award (choice of Amazon Echo Dot or Google Home mini).

Also, special thanks to the poster judges for participating in this event. 

The Fermilab Quantum Science Program (http://qis.fnal.gov/) is seeking PhDs in the fields of Physics, Quantum Science, Mathematics, or Computer Science, to explore algorithms and computational infrastructure for Quantum Computing as a postdoctoral researcher.

Every year, PQI organizes a signature event during April. PQI2018, the sixth event in the series, was held Wednesday through Friday April, 18-20 at the University Club. PQI2018 poster session was organized on Wednesday 18th April for PQI students and postdocs. 

This year more than 70 students, from different departments of University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Duquesne University, were participated in the PQI2018 poster session. PQI faculty members, previous years winners and postdocs were helped in judging the posters and giving the feedback to students.

Sergio de la Barrera (Hunt Lab, CMU) won the grand prize award ($1,000 travel award plus an iPad).

Vikesh Siddhu (Griffiths Lab, CMU), Vaidish Sumaria (Viswanathan Lab, CMU), Lu Chen (Levy Lab, Pitt),  Tzu-Chiao Chien (Hatridge Lab, Pitt), Corinn Durham (Chong Lab, Pitt) and Brandon Vernier (Evanseck Lab, Duquesne) won the poster awards ($1,000 travel award).

Megan Kirkendall Briggeman (Levy Lab, Pitt), Amy Carlson (Evanseck Lab, Duquesne), won the veteran award.

PQI always assists to organize an educational and informative visit in the development of Quantum Science, encouraging the collaborations between various industry and academia.

On March 9th, 2018, four students and one postdoc from University of Pittsburgh were invited to visit Google Quantum-Hardware lab at UC Santa Barbara which was organized by PQI. Eric Ostby and Pedram Roushan, Research Scientists at Google were helped us to arrange this visit.

Google's research team do work hard to build a quantum computer which will be millions of times more powerful than today’s supercomputers. Such visit helps to initiate more academic people to get involved in such projects, playing a hub role for quantum technologies.