Celia Merzbacher

Thomas:

This is Will Thomas with the American Institute of Physics. The date is September 11th, 2024. I’m at the Quantum World Congress in Tysons, Virginia, and I’m speaking with Celia Merzbacher. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Merzbacher:

Yes.

Thomas:

We’re going to be talking about your role with the Quantum Economic Development Consortium as part of the National Quantum Initiative. Also, you’ve had a lot of interesting roles over your career that make for interesting comparisons and contrasts, no doubt. I’d like to also just talk about your career in general. But, if we could, I understand, of course, that your father was in quantum mechanics, so maybe you could tell me a little bit, going all the way back to your childhood, some memories of him and what he did.

Merzbacher:

Thanks, Will. I do feel like my father would be so excited by all the enthusiasm and activity in the quantum physics and quantum space in general. He was a theoretical physicist. He was educated in Turkey during World War II, and then he immigrated to the US for graduate school, and spent his entire career as a professor. He was at the University of North Carolina. He’s well known for having written a textbook on quantum mechanics, which people to this day come up and tell me that they used to learn quantum physics, which I think is really a nice sort of bookend to the Merzbacher story, I guess. I don’t really remember, but in 1958, he did a sabbatical at the Niels Bohr Institute. I had the fortunate experience to visit the institute a couple of years ago, and to go into Niels Bohr’s office there where they have pictures, sort of class portraits, year after year. I looked up 1958, and saw my father there with Niels Bohr. So I feel a sort of personal connection to this field. I’m a materials scientist, not a physicist. But, at the end of the day, quantum mechanics and the quantum nature of our world is part of everything. It’s sort of fundamental. So, sort of fast-forward from my father’s career to the growing scale of interest and activity the field.

Thomas:

Let’s not forget your father’s name. I don’t think we’ve…

Merzbacher:

His name is Eugen Merzbacher. Eugene is the English pronunciation, but his German pronunciation was Eugen [sounds like oy-gen, with a soft g]. He had a long and distinguished career. He ended up being the President of the American Physical Society at one point, and is, to me, a real role model as both an educator and as a scientist. He was very much about collaboration. He worked closely with experimentalists to advance the field. My career began in Earth sciences, actually. My degrees are in geochemistry and mineralogy, but I very quickly pivoted to man-made materials research, and came here to the Washington, D.C. area to work at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Thomas:

Where were your degrees from?

Merzbacher:

My undergraduate degree was from Brown University, and my graduate degrees were from Penn State University. I did a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore studying glasses that were proposed hosts for storage of nuclear waste. That was sort of pivotal—actually, even my graduate work, which was looking at glass, synthetic glass materials that were modeling earth materials, was the beginning of my shift to from minerals to materials. I was studying volcanic glasses by making them in the lab. I was already doing essentially glass science as a graduate student, and then pivoted to glass research, which eventually brought me to work at the Navy on optical materials of various kinds.

Thomas:

That was what your dissertation was on?

Merzbacher:

My dissertation was on the structure, the sort of intermediate-range structure of glassy materials. It’s interesting. I think that geologists have an advantage in some ways because they’re working with very messy, complex systems that are not simple aluminosilicate materials. They have a little bit of this and that, trace elements and so on, that all contribute to all kinds of properties. The thing that was really a 180-degree change when I went from being an Earth scientist to a materials scientist was, when you’re studying in fields like Earth science, you’re trying to understand how did this material come to be. What were the conditions, pressure, temperature, other environmental factors, that led to the formation of this structure or material in the Earth? Whereas when you’re doing materials science, you’re trying to intentionally design something with certain properties. So, it’s a sort of 180-degree different way of thinking… but your tools are all the same. You’re using the same tools for characterizing and understanding these materials.

So, because I had been looking at the short-range order in these glassy materials, I was essentially doing nanoscale science. In the early 2000s, nanoscience became a field, in a sense, and there was a new national initiative, the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which encompassed nanoscience, nanoengineering, and nanotechnology. I had the opportunity at that point to go from the lab to the White House to help run the National Nanotechnology Initiative. That was a fantastic opportunity to learn about policy, learn how does the government make priorities and investments to achieve certain objectives and goals? At OSTP—this was under the George W. Bush administration—Jack Marburger was the OSTP science advisor, and he was really someone who I learned a lot from, and he was… his own experience from having been director at Brookhaven National Laboratory and also president at a university, Stony Brook, came together in his ability to navigate the policy world, the funding process, and he was just a really generous and warm human being. So, it was a pleasure to be part of OSTP at that time.

Thomas:

Can I ask how the opportunity came up in the first place for you to go over?

Merzbacher:

Well, that’s a funny thing. I actually had gone to an event where I met someone who I’d known in graduate school who was at OSTP doing a one-year fellowship. In just having that conversation and catching up, he said, “Well, it would be really great for you to come in. We’ve got this nano initiative getting going. I think you would be a great fit.” So, it was a combination of my skillset and my knowledge and capabilities, as well as that personal connection, as it so often is. I think that if people think about how their career progressed, it is a combination of your knowledge and skills and your network. That was just another case where that was true. I was, I think, open to and receptive to the idea of a change of career at that point, or at least doing something outside the laboratory.

Having been at the Naval Research Lab for about a decade or so… I was interested in or receptive to a new opportunity. I think that’s another important thing, is to be open to opportunities when they present themselves. So, I was at OSTP on a detail from the Navy—I was still a Navy employee at that time—and stayed for five years, and really shepherded the National Nanotechnology Initiative from its inception to something that was regular and institutionalized to a certain extent. We stood up a coordination office. There was an interagency group that became more formal. We started reaching out and interacting with regulatory bodies and a lot of different stakeholders. It wasn’t just about a research program. So, that was really educational, and it was rewarding because… I think at the end of the day, I find it most interesting, and I’ve always sought out opportunities at the intersection of research and application. The National Nanotechnology Initiative was called the National Nanotechnology Initiative, not the National Nanoscience Initiative. It actually was conceived under the Clinton administration, announced but not really launched. I think that ended up being a very fortuitous thing, because when the new administration came in, there were a lot of different policy objectives and views. But they looked at this proposal, and understood the opportunity, and carried it forward. That was a very exciting time to watch that grow.

Thomas:

Remind me, if you could, was there authorizing legislation attached?

Merzbacher:

There was. In 2003, the Nanotechnology R&D Act was passed. After five years, I handed it off to the next person, and left government at that point to go to the Semiconductor Research Corporation or SRC. I was a materials scientist, not a semiconductor engineer. But the SRC was an industry consortium that had been around since the 1980s that was established by semiconductor companies who recognized that they all had a voracious appetite for technology in order to stay on Moore’s Law. Because they were all using the same silicon-based technology, there were some common technology needs, and they had this roadmap that many people may be familiar with.

That roadmap identified… could kind of project ahead, because, thanks to Moore’s Law, they knew the cadence of the miniaturization, the scaling that they were trying to achieve, and what they would need in terms of all kinds of capabilities, whether it was fabrication or metrology or materials. In order to do that, they pooled some resources in this consortium to invest in university research. It was an interesting model, industry pooling resources, investing it in a portfolio of research. Of course, when you give money to a university, students do the research, and then they graduate, and they go and work for the companies, and then the cycle repeats. So, at any given time, SRC was supporting a couple of thousand students. There was a really beneficial virtuous cycle between industry scientists and engineers working with academic faculty and students. That was being done more and more in partnership with government because of, course, government funds universities also. I got to see this ecosystem of industry working, partnering with government, and funding academic research that was really driven, motivated, incentivized by what the industry needed.

Thomas:

How much had you gotten to see that sort of interaction in the nanotech area, which was less well-established than the semiconductor area?

Merzbacher:

I feel like the Nanotechnology Initiative was called nanotechnology to reference the application. But it was much more science research, and it was led at the time primarily by the National Science Foundation. There was what we called consultations with industries, and the semiconductor industry was one of those. So, there were dialogues happening. But there’s really nothing quite like this Semiconductor Research Corporation model that I’m familiar with. I studied it while I was there. I think it was—

Thomas:

While you were at OSTP?

Merzbacher:

No, while I was at SRC. The things that made it possible were the fact that the semiconductor industry had a Moore’s law, they all were using the same technology, and they had common platform technology requirements. Even though they competed in the marketplace, they needed the same fundamental technologies. They had a history of cross-licensing that allowed for sharing. Frankly, the organization—which had been around for 30 years by the time I got there—was launched by Robert Noyce, who was a founder of Intel. I never met him, but I gather he was compelling and charismatic, and he could bring people along. I often find that when you see something that’s successful, if you look in there, there often is a key individual who just is unstoppable, who won’t take no. That was a lesson. I think there is a quote—maybe it was Margaret Mead—never underestimate what [laughs] some sufficiently passionate person can do. [Written addition by CM: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”] One person can really make a difference in a big diverse field in a way. Robert Noyce was one of those people, in the semiconductor field anyhow. So, there was a set of conditions in the semiconductor industry that made it possible for this model to work. I’m not sure it would be created today if it didn’t already exist. But it still to this day exists. It had the roadmap, which was publicly available, and which really motivated the semiconductor—or I should say the electrical and computer engineering research community—in ways that were extremely beneficial, and still are. Those two experiences, running the National Nanotechnology Initiative from OSTP at the highest level, working with all the departments and agencies, then spending time in an industry association where there was really a proof of concept that competitors can work together to advance a technology area… those experiences came together when this National Quantum Initiative was announced, and there was a call for a new consortium that was going to address the needs of the industry.

I sometimes say QED-C is an industry association for an industry that doesn’t exist today—not quite, but it’s coming. So, there’s an opportunity to connect the significant investment that the public sector is making, i.e., government through the National Quantum Initiative, at the same time that there are some very big bets being made in the private sector. So, rather than have a clean linear model where first you’ve got basic research, and then applied research, and then it’s handed off to industry, and it gets commercialized, that’s all happening at the same time. QED-C has, I think, an important function to be an interface for government and, hopefully, to the university researchers as well, and the private sector, and to help get rid of the friction that might be there, to help communicate back to the people who are making priorities on how to and where to invest through roadmap-like activities. If you go and read the National Quantum Initiative Act of 2018, it says that NIST in the Department of Commerce is to establish a consortium of stakeholders. That consortium is to identify what research is needed, and what research is happening, and where the gaps are. It’s to come up with strategies to address the gaps. We did not get resourced to actually fill the gaps. We do gap analyses, we come up with recommendations on what priority areas need to be addressed, and then we have to go out and talk to government agencies or private companies or investors.

We need to share that information so that the people who are choosing to invest in quantum will be informed. We do have a couple of areas where we have done that kind of analysis, and have partnered with NIST to invest in filling some of the research gaps. But there’s more to be done in terms of creating a trusted community that is increasingly global, because the innovation isn’t just happening in the US, and the US doesn’t have such a big lead that it can afford to go it alone. That’s part of what we’re hearing here at the Quantum World Congress this week is how international the ecosystem is these days.

Thomas:

I wonder, on that question of the international aspect of it… of course, quantum is often identified as one of these critical technologies that has to be protected. I’m wondering to what degree you’ve seen the industry being able to navigate this constantly shifting set of export controls and other sorts of controls.

Merzbacher:

Well, it certainly is one of the roles that we’re playing is to help our membership understand and be aware of the policy side of things, including these regulatory regimes that are coming into place. Governments look at borders rather differently from the way that [laughs] companies do. Companies want to do business, they want to find markets, they want to work with collaborators and suppliers wherever they are, and they’re free to do that as long as they’re not breaking the law. Whereas governments, of course, have national interests, both security and economic prosperity. Quantum happens to be emerging into this geopolitical landscape that we are in today, in which there are allies and there are adversaries. A lot of what you see with a critical and emerging technology like quantum—and I think this is… unlike nanotechnology, quantum is seen right from the beginning as having national security implications. Therefore, government doesn’t want to be second place in the quantum race—the US Government, or any government for that matter. Whereas some areas of technology see cycles of support and funding that come and go, quantum, because of this national security aspect, is unlikely, I think, to lose government support. That is, in some ways, providing some assurance and some base level of investment that the private sector can build upon and count upon, in a way.

The international aspect… whereas there’s general agreement on who the adversaries might be, that’s almost cleaner. And we want to put in place security policies and other ways that we can avoid the unintended access to information and intellectual property and so on—if that’s the objective. On the other hand, the national interests are very interesting in the way that they contribute to the partnerships and the alliances. The US partners with a lot of like-minded countries. Yet they’re all interested in having their own quantum supply chain, their own leadership position in the quantum economy of the future, so there’s a competitiveness as well as a partnership dimension to those relationships, which is very interesting to try to be part of. Again, on the industry side, which is what my members are representing, they are eager to collaborate across borders, and to partner. I get up every day thinking, how can we make it as easy as possible for investment and capital to go where it needs to go, for suppliers to work with developers and so on, for people to move freely among like-minded countries? There are a lot of policy levers, whether it’s tax policy or international small business investment programs. There are a lot of examples of government agencies that fund international partnerships. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Thomas:

I saw from your bio that you’re the co-chair of the Quad Investors Network’s Quantum Center of Excellence. The Quad is a particularly interesting new international framework. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

Merzbacher:

The Quad has been around for a while. It is a governmental alliance between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, so it’s intended to be an Indo-Pacific alliance. On the government side, it is trying to strengthen ties among these like-minded countries in that region. Now, the Quad Investors Network is not a government organization. It was established in large part by the efforts of Karl Mehta, who really has been leading that network. He’s an investor, he’s Indian-born, and he has a strong interest in partnerships between the US and India. He has established this Quad Investors Network with the idea that it would invest in advancing technologies that could be useful for national interests but also economic interest. He’s an investor at heart. He created under the Quad Investors Network the first center of excellence focused on quantum.

There are chairs from each of the four countries. I was asked to serve as the US co-chair. We’ve been working over the past year to put together a landscape of what the challenges and opportunities are around quantum business. The Quad Investors Network has very clear goals: increase collaboration; increase capital flow; and increase, ultimately, markets and trade among the Quad countries. Now, from where I sit, the Quad countries, these four countries, is a somewhat arbitrary group. But when I was asked to be involved with this, I said yes, partly because I see this as a sort of sandbox. If these four countries can identify ways to improve collaboration, the flow of capital and trade in markets among the four countries, then that might be something that could be scaled more broadly. We’re really just at the beginning of thinking about what we might do together. Karl brings this network of investors. I and some of the other co-chairs come from the quantum ecosystems in the four countries. How can we connect those communities so that good ideas in the four Quad countries can be brought forward, can find investment, can find partners and, ultimately, grow businesses?

They’re very different countries. Japan’s ecosystem for innovation is quite different from the US and from India and Australia. It’s yet to be shown that we’ll come up with an answer, but I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do some activities and we’ll make some recommendations or suggestion to the governments. They don’t have to necessarily take these up. But I think we bring a set of perspectives that might be useful in, again, taking the results of all that investment that’s going on in these four countries, and taking it to the next level in terms of something that’s going to be useful economically and to the societies.

Thomas:

Shifting gears a little bit, what exactly is the relationship of NIST to QED-C?

Merzbacher:

Well, they’re our sponsor. They’re our first investor. At the beginning, we really were 100% supported by NIST during the establishment phase. Once we started enrolling members, then we developed the current revenue model, which is a blend of revenues from the membership and from NIST. We’re now majority-supported in our operations by the members. Over time, I think, as the quantum industry matures, we’ll look more like a traditional industry association, in a way. We did have an outside review done for us last year to give us some feedback on what we should think about going forward, and they recommended to NIST that they remain a contributor to QED-C for now because it is so early stage. If NIST stepped away from being involved, then they would have less voice and it’s really a public-private partnership. I expect it will remain jointly supported by government and industry for some time.

Thomas:

Backtracking a bit, was there any sort of analogous entity or activity under the Nanotechnology Initiative?

Merzbacher:

No, not really. This is really unique. I will say, though, if I look under the hood, and say, “Who is responsible for QED-C?”—

Thomas:

I wanted to ask if you had any insight on it.

Merzbacher:

Carl Williams. [laughs]

Thomas:

Aha.

Merzbacher:

He was at NIST, and then he did an assignment at OSTP. I give him the credit for recognizing that there needed to be a consortium that brought together this fledgling industry and government. You should interview Carl, if you haven’t already, and get his view on it. NIST has been a fantastic partner because they’re in the Department of Commerce, they have a mission to help industry, and US industry in particular. But, from the beginning, they recognized that quantum is a globally developing technology, and that QED-C should be open to non-US members. We have a white list of countries from which we accept members from outside the US, and that’s proven to be a really good model. I don’t know if it’ll be replicated in other emerging technologies in the future, but it’s proven to be, I think, really useful. Again, I think my background, both on the government side and then the semiconductor consortium side, has proven to be useful to getting things started.

Thomas:

Since you had that experience at the Semiconductor Research Corporation, I wanted to ask you about the chips provisions in the CHIPS and Science Act, because that’s yet another model, and a very aggressive one; extremely well-funded, of course, compared to the others. Of course, it’s a very mature industry. I’m curious if there are any characteristics of that package of policies that you would point to as particularly interesting.

Merzbacher:

Well, absolutely, and I’m glad you asked. It is a smorgasbord that goes from tax incentives for existing companies to reshore manufacturing, and to make sure that leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing or chips manufacturing is happening in the US. Setting that aside, then there’s the chips R&D portion. That’s where I feel like there are real opportunities for the CHIPS program and quantum technology development to find some areas to work together. I would hope, and when I meet with the people in the CHIPS program R&D program office, I point out—

Thomas:

They’re under NIST as well.

Merzbacher:

Yes. We’re maybe cousins or something [laughs] in some ways. From my experience in the semiconductor space, if you go and talk to a semiconductor company, one of the big companies, they have a very good idea of the next-generation chip design and even the generation after that. It takes so long, scaling up and manufacturing industrially a new technology in the semiconductor space, so they’re looking ahead more than five years when they’re talking about internal R&D. If we’re thinking about R&D in the advanced microelectronics space, 5 to 10 years from now, it’s going to also include quantum. I think it is important for the CHIPS R&D program to be intersecting quantum somehow in that future timeline. There’s about $11 billion, I think, in the CHIPS R&D program. I’m not sure how much of that is including quantum in its roadmap or whatever you want to call it. Now, there is a small $2 billion [laughs] program that’s part of the CHIPS Act, which is the Microelectronics Commons program managed by DOD. That got my attention when it was announced because the stated objectives were to create a number of hubs that would allow for prototyping, to develop prototyping capability to bridge between university fabrication and characterization capabilities and industrial high-volume manufacturing. There are nano fabs and things like that at universities. They’re very flexible, but they’re not really that robust. They’re not really demonstrating manufacturability. They’re just for research. Then there’s the full-blown fabs, and those are extremely locked down and not very flexible. There was a recognized gap in the middle for small-volume fabrication, for scaling up and demonstrating manufacturability of new technologies for advanced microelectronics. In the solicitation, they said, “We want these hubs, these prototyping facilities to be able to prototype technologies for six areas.” One of them was quantum.

I was very pleased to see that this program was going to create prototyping capabilities for quantum technologies. They have funded eight hubs, and I was expecting that maybe one of them would be a dedicated quantum prototyping hub. That wasn’t, in the end, the approach that was taken. Several of the eight hubs include quantum technology fabrication and prototyping, along with some other technologies. From the QED-C point of view, we are interested in working closely with that program to see that it serves the members of QED-C, especially the small businesses. Some of them are using university facilities for doing product development, and so there’s a demand that needs to be served for the quantum community and the fledgling industry. We’ll be working closely with those Microelectronics Commons hubs to hopefully make sure that their capabilities meet the needs of the quantum industry, as they were intended.

Thomas:

Did the Microelectronics Commons concept come from within DOD like, you had mentioned, Carl Williams came up with QED-C concept?

Merzbacher:

I believe that it was incubated by a previous DARPA director, but I’m not sure about that. [laughs] It was a concept that was on the shelf, in a way, and they—

Thomas:

This is in the back of my mind, but Victoria Coleman?

Merzbacher:

Yes.

Thomas:

I thought so. Let’s see. Then there are also these regional hub programs, and I think at least one of those went to quantum?

Merzbacher:

Yes. I believe that the EDA in the Department of Commerce selected Elevate Quantum centered in Colorado. It includes partners from the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and it extends up into Wyoming and down into New Mexico, I believe. But the center of mass is definitely in Colorado. Of course, in the Denver and Boulder region there is the University of Colorado, Colorado State, the Colorado School of Mines. The Air Force has its academy. They have many quantum companies now that are springing up. University of Colorado, Denver; University of Denver; JILA; and NIST Boulder. They have a critical mass, and I think that region, probably more than any other, has become a big attractor and mecca for companies. Quantinuum was created from a combination of Honeywell’s Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum Computing in the UK. When that combination or merger happened, they were looking for where to put their headquarters, and they chose Colorado very deliberately. I’m seeing that over and over. There is a real center of excellence coming up in the Chicago area also.

Thomas:

I wanted to ask about Chicago as a comparison. [ed. The Chicago Quantum Exchange was established in 2017.]

Merzbacher:

I think Chicago has outstanding academic institutions, two DOE labs, Argonne and Fermi, so they have those anchor tenants, if you will. But the industry is not quite as well established, but because of all they’re doing… and they just announced this big quantum and microelectronics park that’s going to provide access to cryogenics and all kinds of quantum-relevant capabilities.

Thomas:

Oh yeah, I think I saw that, Cryo-something at Fermilab. [ed. Merzbacher and Thomas are actually referring to two separate places: the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and Fermilab’s Quantum Underground Instrumentation Experimental Testbed (QUIET) facility.]

Merzbacher:

Anyhow, PsiQuantum, which is a California company, has made a big play in Chicago because of all the support, including from the state: Illinois has the wherewithal to commit significant resources—and so Chicago is clearly another center of mass in the US for the quantum community. I would say those are the two obvious ones. There’s so much going on in places like Boston and the Bay Area and southern California and other areas. We’re having our next QED-C meeting in the Pacific Northwest, in the Seattle area. You’ve got Microsoft, Amazon… IonQ, which is an East Coast company that has created a manufacturing facility in the Seattle area because of all the talent that’s there. There are a number of regions, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how that develops. Over the last year, one thing that’s happened is these regional activities. Partly because of the federal programs to stimulate regional hubs, and partly just because of states see this as a potential economic win, there’s a lot of state and regional activity coming up. That will be very interesting to see how that develops over time. States are very much motivated by economic development. When they start getting programs going, that suggests that the powers that be at the state level see this as something that they need to be investing in and thinking about.

Thomas:

In your experience in working with companies, where do they generally see the federal agencies as playing a key or crucial role?

Merzbacher:

I think that they see the federal government, obviously, as the investor in the basic research, the foundational research. I will say that when I was a scientist, I thought of the National Science Foundation as the funding research organization for investing in advancing science. When I went to the policy world, I saw it as really a workforce development agency, because when you invest in university research, you create students who graduate and go out into the world. Without that engine of research, you don’t have the workforce. Companies are very supportive of continued investment in basic research. Then, there are parts of government, of course, that are early adopters for technology, and in particular the defense and aerospace side of things. They often will pay a premium for technology. They want to have access to the leading-edge capabilities. They’ve got really hard problems that are critical. So, they will often pay for the research and engineering that it takes to get something to the point where it can be put into a system, for instance.

Industry does see government as an early customer that will, as I say, sometimes pay for engineering, and pay a premium to buy the technology. Then, hopefully, it will find other markets that maybe are more cost-sensitive, in a way. I think those are the main ways. In addition, many people point to programs like the SBIR program, the Small Business Innovation Research program, that is a seed-funding program that’s a really helpful starter program for companies that don’t want to necessarily take private investment capital that may dilute their ownership and so on. So, the government is an early investor as well.

Thomas:

How would you characterize the differences between some of the large companies that are invested in quantum… I mean, I’ve spoken to Jay Gambetta from IBM, Sergio Boixo from Google. I was going to talk to Krysta Svore from Microsoft. But I haven’t talked to anybody in some of the start-up areas yet. There are a lot of them. I don’t quite know where to begin. [laughs] What’s your view of how that ecosystem operates?

Merzbacher:

We’re really fortunate at QED-C to have all of the above among our members. On the one hand, the big tech companies that you mentioned have the resources to sustain the pre-revenue phase and do the R&D funded by themselves for a long time. On the other hand, they still have to justify that investment. So, they act in some ways like a small start-up inside that big company. None of those companies—IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon—are quantum companies, and so they have a sort of quantum start-up inside. Yet their internal corporate investor is who they need to keep investing and satisfied, so it’s a sort of closed loop. For the startup companies that are trying to develop technology, they have to find other sources of investment. That’s where some of these government programs come in. It’s really critical. I’d say the government right now has a significant role to play in building the bridge from where we are now, where some investors are willing to take the leap, but many others are sitting on the sidelines and waiting. So, an important role of government is to help de-risk some of these ideas in early-stage companies to the point where the private sector is willing to take on the risk going forward. The companies are putting together a combination of resources. Many of them have their roots in university research groups and labs. Some of them even benefit from sustaining those connections. They may have employees who are part-time university employees and part-time with the company. They can take advantage of ways to keep costs to a minimum while they get started. But there are a lot of companies that now have 50, 100, 100-plus employees, and have sufficient capital and investment to be able to sustain that for the foreseeable future. There are some new programs coming online that you may have heard of. The Office of Strategic Capital in the Defense Department is a loan program office. It’s built on the model in the Small Business Administration called the Small Business Investment Corporation, which has been around, I think, since the 1950s, and is a similar program, offering loans and loan guarantees and so on. That’s complementary to some of the other ways that Government invests in start-ups and companies.

Thomas:

It’s interesting. I would’ve drawn a line to DOE, but is that not the—?

Merzbacher:

They have a Loan Program Office as well, that is focused on energy technologies. If there’s a quantum energy technology, it could go through the DOE loan program. I think there’s interest in looking at how that program might be expanded to some extent to offer more support for quantum technologies that are relevant to DOE.

Thomas:

But the model is SBA, you said?

Merzbacher:

Yes.

Thomas:

We’ve covered schematically what QED-C does. What on a day-to-day basis occupies you and others’ attention?

Merzbacher:

QED-C is a fairly lean operation. We have about five full-time employees. Let me just explain that QED-C is not a legal entity. It is an operation, an activity, a program that is managed by SRI, the company that I work for. There are a handful of SRI employees who work on running the consortium, and four or five others who work part-time, who help with marketing and communications and keeping our website up and running and so on. With that staff, we are making sure that we are reaching out, recruiting new members, working with the existing members. But a lot of what we do to achieve this goal of enabling and growing the quantum ecosystem is driven by what the members say they need, and not only say what they need but will help to address. We have now six standing committees that are organized around the following areas: identifying applications and use cases; figuring out what technologies are needed to enable those use cases to be able to make something that would do something useful. Benchmarks and metrics and standards is another area, and that group has done very technical work, and has public-facing GitHub site and papers on benchmarking the performance of quantum computers based on applications and running algorithms on different platforms.

Thomas:

I’ve had some very good conversations about benchmarking. [laughs]

Merzbacher:

Well, it’s important work, and it’s challenging. These benchmarks are not the be-all and end-all. They are benchmarks that keep developing. We’ve been really fortunate to have a core team from the member companies working together to develop those. There are papers on our website that people can go and see. We have a group that’s focused on workforce, because that’s a pain point for everyone, and figuring out how to promote the supply of workers, through education at universities and even before. But because there’s such a demand for quantum workers now, how can we reach out to professional scientists and engineers who may want to pivot into the quantum field, and help them understand what the opportunities are? Not everybody has to have a PhD in physics to get into this field. Then we have two cross-cutting groups. One is on quantum and national security, which is where the parts of government that are really focused on defense and intelligence and national security come together with the companies. Many of our members are not traditional defense contractors, and so it’s an opportunity for the defense community to understand what’s going on in the quantum industry. Then, finally, our newest group is quantum and law, and they’re very active right now with providing feedback and input on export controls and immigration policy. They also have some discussions around intellectual property protection, anything that has a legal dimension. The people who are there come from the general counsel of some of the biggest companies, or sometimes there are law firms who have as their clients companies in the quantum space. It’s an interesting combination, and it also touches on a lot of policy issues as well. Those are our member groups that come together and are really led and driven by what the members say would be most useful for them.

Thomas:

Well, we don’t have a lot of time left on our meeting. [laughs]

Merzbacher:

This has gone so quickly. Thank you.

Thomas:

It has, it has. We’re almost to five o’clock [laughs], and it’s been a long day, I think. But, unless you have anything else to add on quantum, I did want to circle back and ask you about your experiences with PCAST. I believe you were the executive director of it—

Merzbacher:

I was.

Thomas:

—and so I was—

Merzbacher:

Let me say one more thing on the quantum front before we pivot.

Thomas:

You bet.

Merzbacher:

—and that is, again, at the convergence of my background in the semiconductor space. We did a quantum technology manufacturing roadmap, it’s publicly available, and it was a first edition of a manufacturing roadmap, somewhat modeled on the semiconductor roadmap. There was a lot of work that went into that by the members. They said they wanted to do it. It’s version 1.0. I hope that we’re able in the future to continue to refine that, because the semiconductor roadmap really did help guide the research. It unleashed, the researchers on problems the semiconductor industry cared about. I’d like to create that feedback loop in the quantum space, so stay tuned for more on that.

When I was at OSTP, as you noted, I was executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the highest-level science advisory group in the government. That was a wonderful experience because the people who serve on PCAST, I call them the CEOs of big science enterprises. Some of them were from industry, and they were people like Norm Augustine, and others. Then there were presidents of universities, Chuck Vest from MIT and Wayne Clough from Georgia Tech at the time. My interaction with people at that level was so educational. Seeing how they approached challenges, how they prioritized, how they implemented things was really a great opportunity. The chair of PCAST at that time was a gentleman named Floyd Kvamme. He had been involved with being a tech adviser during the Bush campaign, and was offered this opportunity to be what was described as the ambassador for science and technology, to be the co-chair of PCAST.

Thomas:

I think he was announced before Marburger.

Merzbacher:

I think he was, because he had been an adviser to the administration during the transition and so on. Floyd had a background in the semiconductor industry. He then had gone to Apple and then to Kleiner Perkins, so he had this really interesting background, was a total Silicon Valley kind of person. In fact, I remember saying that I was a detailee from the Navy to OSTP, and he thought I said detainee. [laughs] He was so outside of Washington, he didn’t even know the lingo and the jargon.

But he and I would go and have meetings on the Hill, for example with the Speaker of the House—I mean, really senior folks, not staff. We were meeting with the leadership. It was really interesting, because we would go into these meetings, and they would start by talking to Floyd as if they were speaking to Floyd, Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist. But within a few minutes, it was like they were talking to the President because he was representing the President in the meeting, in some ways. They would be saying, “You know what you should be doing,” and they would be trying to get information back to the Executive Office of the President. That’s how things happen in Washington.

I’ll share one experience from PCAST that was just so emblematic of how things happen. One of the last reports that came out of PCAST under my tenure was on personalized medicine. I was talking to the PCAST member who was leading that study. She said, “Well, we’re meeting with the President tomorrow.” I wasn’t going to be at the meeting, but I was just running through her talking points. “You’ll have 15 minutes. What do you want to say?”—kind of coaching her a little bit. At the end, I said, “You’ve got this message you’re going to talk to him about with personalized medicine, but you’ve got the ear of the President. Is there something else you would want to say to him?” She paused, and she said, “Well, there’s this piece of legislation called GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. It has been a bill for”—I think, at that point, like a decade. She said, “It has bipartisan support, but every Congress, it just gets stuck, and it doesn’t come up for a vote.” I said, “Well, you might mention that.” She said, “Nobody’s objecting to it. The industry, everybody seems to be for it, but for some reason it’s not been brought forward for a vote.” Within a week, that bill was voted on and passed. The whole community—I remember seeing the announcement—said, “What happened?” I knew [laughs] what had happened. Somebody who had the ear of the President for just a few minutes brought it up, you know. He, I’m sure, turned to somebody and said, “Look into this.” So, that’s how things can happen at high policy levels. What that says is, you need to be prepared. You need to have the work done. Then when the window is cracked open, you’ve got to be ready to move. I keep that in mind all the time because it really was the origin story of the National Nanotech Initiative. That also was a confluence of things coming together.

Thomas:

I was going to say, I’ve heard similar remarks from Tom Kalil, and I believe he was involved with that.

Merzbacher:

That’s right. The key people in that situation were Tom Kalil and Mike Roco. Mike Roco, who was a senior advisor at the National Science Foundation, had done a National Academy study, so he had this nice report with the seal of approval from the National Academy saying, this nano thing is really a great opportunity. What happened? Here’s the part that nobody could have predicted: the dot-com bubble. When the dot-com bubble happened, all these revenues came into the government, and OMB realized, “We got more money than we were expecting.” Tom Kalil at OSTP said, “Anybody got any good ideas? Anybody?” Mike Roco pulled out that report and said, “Well, this nanoscience and nanotechnology area would be a great thing to invest in.” Tom looked at it, and he said, “Great. This looks really good.” So, that convergence, that’s where the window opened because of this dot-com bubble. Who could have predicted that? But the homework had been done, the plowing of the field, the bringing together of the communities. There were already a few interagency people from NASA and the Navy and NSF, the like-minded bureaucrats, you could say. They were all seeing nanoscience bubbling up. Mike was the person who was the unstoppable force in that equation, in my opinion. Tom was the enabler, and he had the vision there at the White House level. These are really, I think, anecdotes that you can learn from. [laughs] I try to bring them to the QED-C on a daily basis.

Thomas:

Terrific. Well, that’s about an hour. [laughs]

Merzbacher:

I have enjoyed the conversation.

Thomas:

So have I, very much. Thank you so much, Celia.

Merzbacher:

Thank you.

[END]