Quantum Builders
From Spintronics to Quantum Engineering: Building the Chicago Quantum Ecosystem
A fireside chat with:
David Awschalom
What happens when a control experiment goes unexpectedly right, and a physicist decides that building the future of quantum technology requires breaking down every boundary between academia, industry, and government?
If you've ever wondered how a world-class quantum research hub actually gets built, you're about to get the inside story. In a recent conversation with Qblox, Professor David Awschalom, one of the pioneers of spintronics and solid-state quantum information, shared the journey from his early days at IBM to leading one of the most ambitious quantum ecosystems in the world.
What makes his perspective different? While most quantum discussions focus on qubits, Awschalom focuses on people, partnerships, and the surprising reality that over 70% of future quantum jobs won't require a PhD.
Like many breakthroughs in science, Awschalom's journey into quantum information began with something unexpected.
"We accidentally discovered this in a control experiment," he recalls. "We were developing time-resolved techniques to watch electron spins in semiconductors, and as a final calibration check on commercial gallium arsenide, we found something nobody expected."
What they found was that spin-polarized electrons could maintain quantum coherence far longer than theoretical predictions suggested. You could create coherent states, transport them across hundreds of microns using simple electric gates, and detect them, all without the delicate quantum information falling apart.
"At first, I thought it was an error. It took a while for our students to confirm it was real."
This discovery fundamentally challenged existing theories and opened the door to using quantum coherence for information processing. More importantly, it taught Awschalom something about the nature of scientific progress itself.
One of the most refreshing aspects of Awschalom's approach is his embrace of failure, not as an unfortunate side effect of research, but as its essential fuel.
"I was very lucky to be in an environment at IBM that embraced curiosity and exploration, and they were very comfortable with failure," he explains. "That's a good thing for many of us because there's a lot of failing in what we do. People don't talk about it much, but a lot of things don't work."
According to Awschalom, even when you fail, you don't really fail. You learn something. And that informs the next thing you do.
This philosophy has carried through his career across IBM, UC Santa Barbara, and now the University of Chicago, where he's helped build an ecosystem specifically designed to encourage the kind of risk-taking that leads to real breakthroughs.
When the University of Chicago approached Awschalom around 2012, he was skeptical. The university didn't have an engineering school, and he told them as much: "There are lots of great engineering schools. They probably don't need another one."
The response from university president Bob Zimmer surprised him: "We'd like to do something different."
What emerged was the Chicago Quantum Exchange, not a traditional academic program, but an ecosystem designed to blur every conventional boundary between universities, national laboratories, and industry.
"I said to them: you could be the first place in the country to have a quantum science and engineering program," Awschalom recalls. "And then as I was leaving, he said, 'I think we should do that.'"
The pitch was ambitious: take advantage of Chicago's unique position near Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, leverage resources like synchrotrons and supercomputing facilities that no single university could afford, and create a space where industry could see science developments in real-time rather than waiting years to read papers.
The vision was to create an environment where information flowed freely across traditional boundaries, taking advantage of Chicago's strengths not just in physics and chemistry, but also in business, biology, and even law.
Awschalom emphasizes that developing new technology means grappling early with policy questions early: who sets standards for security, and what are the ethical implications? Getting ahead of those conversations matters as much as the science itself.
One element that sets Chicago apart is the active involvement of state government, particularly that of Governor J.B. Pritzker, whose background as a venture capitalist gave him an unusual appreciation for both the risks and potential of emerging technology.
"If you'd asked me 10 years ago if I would ever be speaking with a governor as a physicist, I would have said that's never going to happen," Awschalom admits. "It's been a privilege, and I've learned quite a lot."
The partnership has proven transformative. The state has proposed significant investments in quantum technologies, including funding for cryogenic facilities and the development of a quantum campus. This kind of sustained government support has helped attract companies and investment to the region in ways that pure academic excellence alone couldn't achieve.
"He's become a very effective spokesperson and helped bring many of the companies here to Illinois and the Midwest."
Beyond the Chicago Quantum Exchange, Awschalom served as inaugural director of Q-NEXT, one of the Department of Energy's National Quantum Information Science Research Centers. The center, which was recently renewed for another five years with $125 million in funding, represents a different model: using the extraordinary facilities of national laboratories to accelerate basic science.
"When I moved here, I didn't think I’d greatly appreciate the immense power of the national labs," Awschalom acknowledges. "Their facilities, their highly trained technical support, things they can do beyond any university I'm aware of."
Consider what it means to have access to a synchrotron, a billion-dollar instrument that can probe materials at the atomic scale, holding X-rays in nanometer position at low temperatures, running 24 hours a day with thousands of users annually.
"If you want to build an atomic-scale technology, you better have access to a synchrotron to see atoms. You better have connections to supercomputing facilities so you can model materials."
The center brings together a dozen universities working on shared projects, with students able to move between environments and use facilities they couldn't access in their own laboratories.
Ask Awschalom about the biggest bottleneck in scaling quantum technology, and his answer might surprise you. It's the people.
"When we talk to companies around the country, it's their primary concern. Oddly enough, it's a little bit less about the science. They're remarkably optimistic, partly because many of them have such excellent people working there. But finding the right number of qualified workforce people in a field moving so fast is a major challenge."
The numbers are sobering. "Boston Consulting, for example, did a pretty long and detailed study on this and said by 2035, you'll need just under 200,000 jobs to be filled in quantum science and engineering in the Midwest alone. And the economic impact globally of these jobs by 2035 is over $50 billion."
Here's where it gets even more interesting. When consultants analyzed the skills these jobs would actually require, they found that "over 70% of the jobs will be for people with undergraduate degrees, community college degrees, and associate degrees." Not PhDs. Not even necessarily physics majors.
"They said these are many of the skills that electrical engineers have today. Advanced instrumentation, cryogenics, data analysis, microwave engineering, fast electronics. But these technical skills are now being redirected towards the quantum world. At the end of the day, the amount of quantum science you need to know is quite minimal. It's actually a skill set you need to develop."
If over 80% of the 2030 workforce has already left formal education, traditional academic pipelines simply won't scale fast enough. Awschalom's solution is to think like a semiconductor manufacturer.
"We're thinking about how you can scale an educational model like you would scale a semiconductor technology. We're using teachers to amplify results—each teacher can deal with hundreds of students."
This means training high school teachers and community college instructors, not just students. It means developing portable curriculum materials that can be freely shared and adapted. It means running internships for teachers who can then "convey that excitement to literally hundreds of students each."
Illinois has an advantage here: the third-largest community college system in the United States. "This is an opportunity for this part of the country to harness that interest and a broad set of student experiences into the quantum domain."
So what exactly is this growing workforce being prepared to build? The technical frontier is moving faster than most people realize, and several recent developments have shifted even Awschalom's own thinking about what's possible.
One of Awschalom's most provocative ideas challenges how we think about building quantum devices altogether.
"Most of our technology today has emerged from the top down. We take a wafer or block of semiconductor, use impressive fabrication techniques in clean rooms to form nanometer-scale devices. We're literally carving devices out of blocks."
But what if you'd never seen a semiconductor and someone asked you to make a billion identical, atomically perfect quantum bits?
"You might say, well, what about if we start with nothing and grow them from the bottom up? Do what chemists have excelled at for nearly a century. Make identical molecules."
This approach, using molecular chemistry to design quantum systems atom by atom, offers unprecedented control over quantum properties. "You can be an atomic engineer. Molecular chemists excel at designing molecules: What is the bond, what are the distances, what are the neighbors, what is the symmetry? It's literally a designer system."
When students ask Awschalom which direction they should pursue in quantum, his advice is refreshingly unconventional:
"Follow your passion. There's no wrong answer because so much of this science and engineering is portable. You might say you're going to do a PhD with cold atoms for quantum computing, but 90% of that science and engineering would work with superconducting qubits or semiconductor qubits or communication or sensing."
He resists making specific recommendations, partly because "like gambling, you're likely to be wrong."
But also because the diversity of the field is its strength: "We're so lucky to be in a profession where you can pursue a job that's also your hobby, where you're genuinely interested, and it's hard to stop thinking about it when you go home. That's the key to success."
Looking ahead, Awschalom sees the field accelerating faster than anyone predicted, making the workforce challenge all the more urgent.
"If you'd asked this question to many of us five years ago, we'd say quantum advantage might happen in a few decades. It's so much faster now. I think it's going to happen soon."
But perhaps more importantly, he sees the biggest impacts as the ones nobody can predict yet.
"When people asked the same question when the transistor was invented, companies like Bell Labs wrote pages of patents for things they thought would be really important. But you know what they never thought about? Integrated circuits, cellular communication, social media."
The lesson? Build the ecosystem, train the workforce, and stay ready for the surprises.
"We need to be ready to act at that moment. Something at some point will become clear—my God, this is amazing, we haven't thought about it. What a great idea. But we need to be ready."
Quantum progress depends on collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and the boundaries between research and industry. At Qblox, we're proud to support that vision. Whether you're exploring new qubit modalities in the lab or scaling toward production, we're here to help you build what's next. Contact us today for more information.
