Tuning the Field: Notes from the NYC Quantum Summit

On a Washington Square Park afternoon the week before the summit, passersby stopped to learn a little quantum computing and then tried it themselves. Their task was learning about what a qubit is and tune it to working orderopens in a new tab, one step at a time. The qubit sat in a dilution refrigerator in an NYU lab across the park, controlled live over the cloud, and their progress appeared on a leaderboard.

Calibration is quiet, unglamorous work, but a necessity as systems grow toward thousands of qubits. It is also a fair description of the NYC Quantum Summit, a convening now in its fifth year that tries to keep a fast-moving field tuned to real progress.

The NYU Quantum Institute, part of NYU Global Science and Technology, hosted the summit October 5 and 6, 2026, drawing more than 200 attendees from academia, industry, investment, and government. The summit began in 2022 in a small NYU School of Law lounge, convened by Javad Shabani, who now directs the Quantum Institute.

Juan de Pablo, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and executive dean of NYU Tandon School of Engineering, opened by describing a year of progress: the launch of the Quantum Institute, two NYU researchers—Andrei Vrajitoarea and Norah Hoffmann—selected for the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission for work using AI to control quantum hardware, and the creation of a new joint postdoctoral program in partnership with IBM that will place NYU postdocs across disciplines were just a few examples of the University’s initiatives supporting quantum.

Speakers approached the field from different directions and kept returning to collaboration. Head of Applied Quantum Science at IBM Sarah Sheldon outlined the company's roadmap toward fault-tolerant quantum computers, machines that use error correction to combine many fragile physical qubits into more stable logical ones.

"Our goal is to bring useful quantum computing to the world," she said, adding that the work "cannot be done alone."

Itamar Sivan, CEO at Quantum Machines, addressed calibration, the process of tuning a qubit before it can be used, which is becoming a bottleneck as systems grow toward thousands of qubits. His proposed fix is to interleave calibration with computation so machines stay tuned while they run.

De Pablo closed his welcome with a line that holds the two days together: "Connection transcends distance." The partnerships formed across institutions, sectors, and countries are meant to outlast the summit.

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About NYU Global Science and Technology

NYU Global Science and Technology connects expertise across the University's schools, campuses, and global sites, and builds the partnerships that carry scientific work from discovery into use. Led by Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President Juan de Pablo, the office supports institutes working across quantum science, health, climate, artificial intelligence, and entrepreneurship, and works to make NYU one of the world's preeminent institutions for science and technology. Visit our page to learn more.