Quantum Leaps A major gift from Roy Eddleman, along with multiple large grants, cement UC Santa Barbara’s status as an international hub for quantum research Some of the most groundbreaking technological advances of the 21st century are being pioneered by UC Santa Barbara scientists and engineers working in the realm of quantum. If quantum is a wave of the future, UC Santa Barbara is riding the crest. And philanthropists and major funding agencies are noticing. They are part of a revolution — a quantum revolution that centers on nature’s smallest units. The quantum world is where particles can exist in several states at once and change states instantly as though distance were no matter. Case in point: Tech businessman Roy T. Eddleman’s leadership gift establishes the university’s Roy T. Eddleman Center for Quantum Innovation, promising the “acceleration of progress in quantum science and engineering research, education and programs.” The gift supports a variety of quantum sciencerelated activity, including research, postdoctoral and graduate fellowships. Eddleman Center activities will be coordinated by professors Ania Jayich, David Weld and Stephen Wilson. “UC Santa Barbara has so many brilliant people, you can’t even begin to think of the possibilities of what they might discover, invent or find in the future,” Roy said. “What we need to do is find young, brilliant grad students and undergrads who are just deciding what they are going to pursue, and hopefully lure a lot of them into the quantum sciences, because it’s an incredible world there.”
Shaping the Future Annual Report of Private Giving
The sentiment is reflected too in a recent $25 million award from the National Science Foundation to establish, at UC Santa Barbara, the nation’s first Quantum Foundry. Also directed by Jayich and Wilson, the foundry will aim to leverage the campus’s strengths in materials, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering and computer science, as well as its tradition of multidisciplinary collaboration, to advance quantum science-based technologies. Drawing from state-of-the-art facilities such as the Materials Research Lab and the California NanoSystems Institute, among others, Foundry members aim to widen the field of quantum knowledge for technologies not yet dreamt of.
