Quantum Events, Quantum Ecosystem

Quantum employers will meet talent at Chicago’s mHUB in December

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August 8, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Hundreds of student and postdoctoral researchers will connect with quantum employers at the Chicago Quantum Recruiting Forum on December 7, an event now strategically positioned to launch the larger Q2B26 x Chicago Quantum Summit. The expanded job event, hosted by the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the University of Chicago’s Office of Career Advancement, will be held at mHUB, a hardtech innovation center in Chicago’s West Loop.

“With the tremendous quantum ecosystem growth across Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana, we’re thrilled to expand the Quantum Recruiting Forum and align with Q2B x Chicago Quantum Summit,” said Emily Easton, the CQE’s director of education and workforce development, emphasizing the effort to link talent with industry.

December 7th Forum Launches Q2B26 x Chicago Quantum Summit

This shift from a spring event positions the forum as a key talent pipeline for the broader quantum industry gathering, hosted by QC Ware and the Chicago Quantum Exchange from December 8-10. The move underscores a concentrated effort to connect emerging quantum professionals with potential employers immediately before a major collaborative summit.

This year’s forum anticipates engaging hundreds of students and postdoctoral researchers with quantum companies, offering both one-on-one meetings with recruiters and a dedicated career fair. mHUB, a hardtech and manufacturing innovation center, provides specialized laboratory space for quantum technology companies and serves as an On-Ramp facility for the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park. Last year’s event drew 600 attendees, and organizers expect the expanded format to further support the development of a skilled quantum workforce in the Illinois-Wisconsin-Indiana region, which is projected to require tens of thousands of workers over the next decade.

The Chicago Quantum Exchange has also recently launched initiatives to bolster quantum talent development, including the Q-Ready professional development program and the Talent Portal. The Talent Portal, a free career tool, provides access to hundreds of open roles within the CQE community’s network of over 60 quantum employers and facilitates direct recruitment.

David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics at the University of Chicago, the director of the CQE, and a senior scientist at Argonne National laboratory, emphasized the importance of workforce preparation, stating, “Scaling a well-prepared workforce is one of the most critical hurdles to quantum sector growth.” He added that the CQE “is committed to creating paths into the quantum sector for a wide range of candidates and helping quantum companies discover, engage, and ultimately hire top talent.”

Scaling a well-prepared workforce is one of the most critical hurdles to quantum sector growth.

David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics at the University of Chicago, the director of the CQE, and a senior scientist at Argonne National laboratory
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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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