Quantum Companies, Quantum People

Elevate Quantum hires Melissa McMillan to lead operations

Avatar of Ivy Delaney
September 30, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Elevate Quantum has appointed Melissa McMillan as Director of Operations, a role she has already been shaping for over a year. McMillan brings an unusual background to the quantum field, with nearly a decade managing geoscience projects before transitioning to data and technology. She will now focus on coordinating Elevate Quantum’s consortium of more than 100 organizations, transforming the group into a functioning quantum computing ecosystem. “Her experience, energy, and deep commitment to building a thriving quantum ecosystem will be invaluable as Elevate enters its next phase of growth,” said CEO Jessi Olsen.

McMillan’s Cross-Industry Background Supports Elevate Quantum Growth

Melissa McMillan’s arrival follows more than a year of collaboration, during which she spearheaded operations, project management and automation initiatives for the consortium. This cross-industry background, coupled with a PMP certification, suggests a focus on robust project delivery within a complex, multi-stakeholder environment. Founded in 2023 and backed by $41 million in federal funding, Elevate Quantum coordinates over 120 organizations in the Mountain West region, making effective operational leadership critical to its success, the company says.

McMillan’s expertise extends beyond technical project management, as evidenced by her directorship of the PMI Mile Hi Women Connect Group. In 2025, Mesa Quantum validated its technology at Commercialization Lab, highlighting the facility’s role in supporting early-stage quantum companies. The focus now shifts to translating the consortium’s collective efforts into tangible outcomes and establishing the Mountain West as a leading quantum hub.

Her experience, energy, and deep commitment to building a thriving quantum ecosystem will be invaluable as Elevate enters its next phase of growth.

Jessi Olsen, CEO at Elevate Quantum

Elevate Quantum’s operational strategy now centers on translating consortium-wide efforts into deliverables, with Melissa McMillan directing the initiative. This experience has been focused on streamlining operations for an organization coordinating over 100 entities, a scale that presents unique logistical challenges beyond technical hurdles.

More like this
Quantum HardwarePaik, UMD alum, helped build IBM’s first 16-qubit quantum computer
Quantum Computing Business NewsIQM Quantum Computers launches long-term incentive plan for staff
Quantum PeopleVlatko Vedral, The Oxford Physicist Who Put a Number on Entanglement
Quantum PeopleBen Varcoe, The Leeds Physicist and Entrepreneur Behind Creavo and Cavero
Stay current

See today’s quantum computing news on Quantum Zeitgeist for the latest breakthroughs in qubits, hardware, algorithms, and industry deals.

Tags:
Data Science
Avatar of Ivy Delaney

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.

Latest Posts by Ivy Delaney: