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UIC joins Midwest group building quantum future

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October 15, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The University of Illinois Chicago is now financially supporting its membership in the Midwest Quantum Collaboratory, joining a regional hub of eight universities established in 2021 to accelerate quantum technology development. “UIC is claiming a larger presence in this constantly evolving quantum ecosystem,” said Daniela Tuninetti, professor and department head of electrical and computer engineering, as the university seeks to expand collaborative research and workforce training in quantum information science and engineering. In July, UIC attended the Midwest Quantum Collaboratory’s fifth annual Entanglement meeting, hosted by Purdue University.

UIC Joins Eight-University Midwest Quantum Collaboratory

UIC’s commitment to collaborative quantum research received a financial boost through the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, directly supporting the university’s membership in the Midwest Quantum Collaboratory. This consortium, established in 2021, unites eight institutions, Purdue University, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Indiana University, Washington University in St. Louis, The Ohio State University, Northwestern University and UIC, to accelerate development in the rapidly evolving field of quantum technology. In July, UIC marked its active engagement with the group by attending the fifth annual meeting hosted at Purdue University, signaling a recent and deliberate expansion of its quantum initiatives.

Vice Chancellor for Research Joanna Groden emphasized the value of this inter-institutional partnership, stating, “This is a wonderful opportunity for UIC, our faculty and trainees to consider new approaches to big questions in quantum with our colleagues at other universities. Innovation thrives when researchers from different areas and institutions collaborate.” The collaboratory facilitates knowledge sharing and research partnerships, allowing participating universities to pool expertise and resources in quantum information science and engineering, a field focused on technologies exceeding the capabilities of classical computing, communication, and sensing.

Russell Hemley, professor of physics and chemistry, highlighted UIC’s contributions, noting that UIC brings significant expertise to the collaboration through its unique research and workforce development efforts. The focus extends beyond research to encompass student development, with Zizwe Chase, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, anticipating benefits for the UIC Quantum Club and its members.

UIC is claiming a larger presence in this constantly evolving quantum ecosystem.

Daniela Tuninetti, professor and department head of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Eng
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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