Quantum Sensors, Deep Tech

Toyota and UChicago partner to build quantum sensors and materials

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November 3, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Toyota will provide up to $1 million in annual funding to the University of Chicago, initiating a multi-year research agreement focused on advancing quantum technologies for future transportation systems. The collaboration will heavily use the faculty and resources of UChicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering across five initial projects encompassing communication, sensing and materials discovery.

“By pairing academic discovery with industrial insights, we can accelerate the timeline for bringing quantum technologies out and into real-world transportation systems,” said David Awschalom, Director of the Chicago Quantum Institute and lead researcher. This initiative aims to translate foundational quantum science into improvements for vehicle sensing, data security, and energy storage.

UChicago PME and Toyota Advance Quantum Sensing for Vehicle Systems

The collaborative research will use advanced computational modeling to predict and design materials exhibiting novel electronic properties for quantum sensing applications, enabling detailed monitoring of energy storage systems. Researchers will attempt to translate the high accuracy achieved in laboratory settings to real-world driving conditions, potentially enhancing a vehicle’s ability to perceive its surroundings. This work is coupled with efforts to establish secure communications protocols, investigating methods to protect data transmission between vehicles, infrastructure and data centers.

The initiative’s scope extends to five initial areas of focus: communication, sensing, materials discovery, theoretical modeling and electronic properties, demonstrating a comprehensive approach to quantum technology integration. A significant aspect of the collaboration is its commitment to encouraging the next generation of quantum scientists. The initial phase of the research will fund up to eight UChicago graduate students, providing them with direct exposure to industrial research challenges as advanced mobility systems are designed.

Jeff Makarewicz, Group Vice President, Advanced Research & Technical Resources, Toyota, said, “Through the UChicago, Toyota gains access to fundamental discoveries, advanced talent and new computational approaches to solve complex engineering challenges.” In turn, Toyota offers UChicago the opportunity to translate research into tangible societal impact. Toyota currently hosts two researchers as visiting scientists in the Awschalom and Galli labs at UChicago.

By pairing academic discovery with industrial insights, we can accelerate the timeline for bringing quantum technologies out of the lab and into real-world transportation systems.

David Awschalom, Director of the Chicago Quantum Institute, the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering at UChicago PME
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Materials Discovery quantum sensing quantum technologies University of chicago
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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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