Top Quantum Scientists Convene at NYU

Quantum is, as the saying goes, having a moment. 

In the middle of NYU hosting the two-day NYC Quantum Summit 2025 in early October, a 200-strong, invite-only crowd of the field’s luminaries learned that three of their peers had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. 

“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,” Olle Eriksson, chair of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science’s Physics committee, stated from Stockholm in announcing the award.

To put it into perspective: As pointed out by Matthias Troyer, corporate vice president of Quantum at Microsoft Research in his summit presentation, current computing and critical technologies such as AI are built on the same counting framework as the abacus, which dates back to at least 2300 BCE. With quantum computing, we have for the first time in five millennia an opportunity to change the way computations are carried out at scale. 

“Quantum”—for the majority uninitiated—ultimately refers to the peculiar physics of subatomic (defined as smaller than an atom) matter, which, for reasons both known and unknown, operates by a completely different set of rules compared to macroscopic, or visible, particles. Work in this field is so timely and essential, it is helping to fuel some of the university’s next great scientific steps.

“We're in the middle of a science and technology revival at NYU, where the plan is to invest in over a hundred new faculty hires over the next few years,” Juan de Pablo, the university’s inaugural executive vice president for global science and technology and the dean of the Tandon School of Engineering, stated during his opening remarks. “Along with that, we've acquired a wonderful building, a million square feet just a few blocks away, the Wannamaker building [770 Broadway], where incredible new scientific laboratories and state-of-the-art facilities will be located. Almost a hundred years ago, in 1928, Robert Mulliken from NYU’s Department of Chemistry was the first to assign quantum numbers to the electrons in molecules. We are building on that legacy of discovery in quantum information sciences to fuel the inventions of tomorrow.”

“Quantum has always been a big part of our tradition at NYU,” said Gregory Gabadadze, NYU’s dean of science, noting that the university’s physics department’s connection to quantum theory dates to 1935. “Today, we're very happy to interact with the rest of the world to engage in collaboration on both research and pedagogy, and we hope something very good will come out of it.”

The forum, now in its fourth year, drew a who’s who in quantum from around the globe, including academics David Awschalom (University of Chicago), William Oliver (MIT), Irfan Siddiqi and Claire Cramer (University of California, Berkeley), Akira Oiwa and Masahiro Kitagawa (University of Osaka), and David Reilly (University of Sydney); industry powerhouses Troyer and Bela Bauer (Microsoft), Eric Kessler (Amazon), Reza Nejabati (Cisco), Sauli Sinisalo (Bluefors), Elica Kyoseva (NVIDIA), and Jerry Chow (IBM) and Kristine Rezai (IQM); institute leaders Charles Black (Brookhaven National Laboratory), Stuart Woods (Niels Bohr Institute), and Kyle Serinak (Lincoln Lab); and two champions of the science at the governmental level, Colin Ahern (New York State) and Fikriye Selen-Okatan (Finland).

everal themes emerged across the conference, and perhaps most striking was the pressing need for more people to join the field. Consistent with that view, NYU has just announced a new master’s degree in quantum science and technology. The University of Chicago’s Awschalom noted in his presentation that the quantum workforce will soon need to grow by at least 200,000 people, as anticipated by analysts. 

Surprisingly, he estimated that only around 30 percent of those jobs will need to be filled by PhDs (described as “quantum-specific”); for the remaining 70 percent, some will need a Bachelor of Science (deemed “quantum-adjacent”), while others could be total outsiders (labeled as “non-quantum”).

MIT’s Oliver noted that quantum computing involves hardware that poses a major obstacle to success: these machines demand engineering that is complicated, comprehensive, and efficient in design. For example, when a device is processing a trillion instructions per second, electrical signals are rapidly passing through a wide array of temperatures, which may threaten a machine’s functionality. But the skills needed to solve these challenges, he noted, could be mastered in a trade school. 

The crowd gathered in Rosenthal Pavillion, showcasing the New York City skyline from the 10th floor of the Kimmel Center, most definitely fell squarely into the 30 percent “quantum-specific” category. 

They have first-hand familiarity with terms such as exact diagonalization, synthetic data generation, linearized gravity, qutrit gates, algorithmic discovery, stochastic mechanics, semiconductor wafers, proton entanglement, and density matrices—and know where both the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) are located. But even for those of us who can’t distinguish the von Neumann entropy from the anthropic principle, quantum still holds the promise to better our lives. 

“We are at an inflection point,” noted the event’s organizer and emcee, Professor Javad Shabani, director of NYU’s Center of Quantum Information Physics and the newly established NYU Quantum Institute. “Quantum 1.0 was making discoveries and building foundations. Quantum 2.0 is moving from research to delivering to market. Solve this chemistry problem. Find a drug that cures cancer. We are not there yet, but we see we're gonna get there, and that’s the most exciting part. The momentum is accelerating.”