Our Outreach Initiatives
The CQD-MQD is committed to making our research accessible to the broader public. To do so, we are engaged in multiple efforts to bridge quantum computing and chemistry education, as well as efforts to expand opportunities for participation in quantum chemistry and quantum information science and engineering (QISE) fields!
Our educational initiatives target multiple education levels. For instance, we have developed graduate-level courses on quantum computing for chemistry, but we also work to engage undergraduate students in both research and outreach. We offer enriching summer research opportunities for undergraduate students, including student interns from Lafayette College, and outreach activities organized by the PIs, graduate students, and postdocs. We also provide opportunities for chemistry undergraduate students to engage with QISE topics via course-based approaches, such as the Compute-to-Learn (C2L) pedagogy which has already benefited more than 100 students (60% women), as well as extracurricular events.
For example, graduate students and postdocs have organized multiple workshops, including the CCI Quantum Computing Workshop, and workshops for the Yale Pathways to Science Summer Scholars program, a K-12 education STEM outreach infrastructure for high school students from 14 different high schools. During the Pathways to Science workshop, students become familiarized with quantum concepts such as quantum superposition, measurements, and probabilistic outcomes in the context of quantum chess, with the evolution of pieces on a chessboard analogous to the quantum evolution of molecular adsorbates on an electrode or catalytic surface. In addition, CCI graduate students and postdocs have designed and facilitated workshops and tutorials on quantum computing for undergraduate students (e.g., at the University of New Haven and UConn), and graduate students (e.g., at the 2022 CECAM Workshop on Machine Learning and Quantum Computing for Quantum Molecular Dynamics in Paris, France). Open-source tutorials such as YouTube videos, Jupyter notebooks, and software made available to the public through GitHub, and GitLab.