Former IU physics undergraduate Josh Apanavicius will soon be the first to complete the new Indiana University MS degree program in Quantum Information Science. This degree program design was led by physics department professor W. M. Snow with help from many members of the IU Quantum Science and Engineering Center, was approved by the Indiana Commission of Higher Education in fall 2021, and started in fall 2022 with Josh as one of the first students. This degree program is housed in the IUB Graduate School.
The QIS MS degree program includes research work and internship experience. Josh worked in the ion trap lab of Phil Richerme and also helped IUB’s Adrian German, the 2021 Workforce Development Chair of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), to develop an online quantum “bootcamp” for students entering the IUB QIS MS degree program. The exercises and modules developed for this “bootcamp” have now been turned into an introductory class in quantum computation taught by Adrian in the computer science department starting in summer 2022.
Josh will finish his QIS MS degree requirements while working in a remote internship with SRI-International on “quantum benchmarking”, whose goal is to provide a collection of prototypical application- or algorithm-centric benchmark programs designed for the purpose of characterizing the end-user perception of the performance of current-generation quantum computers.