Deep Tech, Quantum Education

Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park’s $20,000 donation lets school craft quantum lab.

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November 5, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

A $20,000 donation from PsiQuantum is enabling St, the company says. Francis de Sales High School to build a quantum science lab, a capability previously impossible due to longstanding budget constraints. The new lab, physically located on the school’s ground floor, aims to connect students with potential future job opportunities at the nearby Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park.

Jane Healy, who leads the Science Olympiad program at St. Francis de Sales, explained the impact. Principal Dr. Roni Facen hopes the lab will break barriers for students, stating, “I think this is breaking that glass ceiling and saying, ‘No, you can become a scientist.’”

$20,000 PsiQuantum Donation Funds New St. Francis de Sales Quantum Lab

The $20,000 donation directly addresses this constraint, allowing for a purpose-built space designed to encourage hands-on quantum learning. Santiago Velazquez, a junior currently studying AP Biology and STEM, lives only a couple of blocks from the park and anticipates the lab experience will be relevant even as he pursues a degree in civil engineering.

Roni Facen envisions the lab as a catalyst for broadening access to STEM fields, emphasizing the importance of providing equitable opportunities for students. Healy added that the school intends to share the resources received, stating, “We shouldn’t keep those resources we received just to ourselves.”

Pretty much everything in this room either is like 40 years old or it’s something I bought… we just don’t have the budget.

Jane Healy, Teacher and Science Olympiad Program Lead at St. Francis de Sales

South Side Access Expanded Through Quantum Science Programming

Principal Roni Facen, a product of the local community and an alumna of St. She notes longstanding disparities in access to technology and scientific exploration based on socioeconomic factors, and believes the new lab is actively dismantling those barriers. “It’s not outside their community they can hope and dream. They can do that here on the South Side,” she said, highlighting the importance of localized opportunities for students to envision themselves in STEM careers. The school’s per capita income of approximately $20,000 annually highlights the financial constraints faced by many families, making the lab’s accessibility particularly vital.

Healy anticipates this exposure will be transformative for students, stating, “I hope that kids come out of here and see they are just as capable and just as smart as a kid from the North Side.” She further explained that the physical presence itself, a tangible space dedicated to advanced science, is a powerful symbol of possibility demonstrating to students that success in STEM is attainable for all. Other schools are also taking part in the program, including Thomas Hoyne Elementary, Robert A. Black Elementary, Ninos Heroes Elementary, James Madison Elementary and Bowen High School.

I hope that kids come out of here and see they are just as capable and just as smart as a kid from the North Side.

Jane Healy, Teacher and Science Olympiad Program Lead at St. Francis de Sales
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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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