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