Merge pull request #630 from francespoblete/main

Advisory board 2025 blog

src/content/blog/2024_advisory_board_2025.md

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+---
+title: Introducing the Unitary Fund’s Advisory Board 2025
+author: Frances Poblete
+day: 25
+month: 11
+year: 2024
+tags: 
+  - advisory board
+  - members
+---
+Each year, Unitary Fund’s advisory board, composed of experts from across the quantum technology community, works hand-in-hand with our staff to administer our microgrants. . This dedicated team plays a key role in sourcing and reviewing grant applications, mentoring groundbreaking projects, and providing invaluable technical guidance for the open source ecosystem. With expertise spanning the entire quantum technology stack—including hardware, programming languages, quantum machine learning, open quantum systems, quantum compilers, and beyond—they bring unparalleled knowledge and passion to every aspect of our mission.
+
+We are thrilled to announce the members of the Advisory Board for 2025!
+
+![advisors2025](/images/2025_advisors.png)
+
+## Meet the Advisors
+
+**Stephen DiAdamo**
+Stephen DiAdamo completed his Ph.D. at the Technical University of Munich and has received two Unitary Fund grants for his work on software for quantum networks. Before co-founding Qoro Quantum, he worked as a research scientist at Cisco, focusing on network technology.
+
+**Sonika Johri**
+Sonika Johri has worked in the quantum industry for over a decade and has authored > 30 publications in leading peer-reviewed journals. She was a Principal Researcher at IonQ, where she ran the quantum applications research group, and prior to that a Research Scientist at Intel. She holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University. Her work centers around translating the rapidly expanding capabilities of quantum hardware into measurable advantages for end users of quantum computing. She is currently founder of the startup Coherent Computing Inc which is building software to enable cutting-edge quantum applications.
+
+**Ryan LaRose**
+Ryan LaRose is an Assistant Professor at MSU-Q (in CMSE, ECE, & PA), previously a postdoc in the Computational Quantum Science Lab at EPFL.
+
+In 2022, he received a PhD in Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering from MSU along with an Engineering Distinguished Fellowship, Fitch H. Beach Award for Outstanding Graduate Research, and NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellowship.
+
+In 2017, he received a BS with Distinction in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
+
+He does research in computational physics and quantum information science. He’s interested in both the physics of computation and the computation of physics - that is, what quantum physics can tell us about information and computer science, and how quantum computers can solve practical problems in physics and related fields.
+
+**Roger Luo**
+Roger is a scientific software engineer at QuEra Computing Inc., where he leads open-source initiatives for quantum physics, compilation and tooling. He received his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2024. A recipient of the 2020 Wittek Quantum Prize, he is one of the creators of Yao and several foundational packages in the Julia ecosystem, with significant contributions to the Julia, CUDA.jl and PyTorch. His theoretical research explores the application of modern programming paradigms and machine learning in quantum many-body physics.
+
+**Daniel Mills**
+Dan Mills is a research scientist in the compiler team at Quantinuum, having previously completed a PhD in quantum computing at the University of Edinburgh. He is broadly interested in software driven techniques for extracting power from near term quantum devices, but is particularly active in circuit optimisation, error mitigation and characterisation, and distributed quantum computing.
+
+**Ryan Shaffer**
+Ryan Shaffer is an applied science manager at Amazon Web Services, where he leads a team of scientists and engineers building tools for writing and running programs on quantum computers through Amazon Braket. He received a PhD in physics and quantum computation from UC Berkeley. He has previously worked at Microsoft, Meta, and Sandia National Labs.
+
+**Sukin (Dylan) Sim**
+Sukin (Dylan) Sim is a Senior Quantum Applications Architect at PsiQuantum, where they develop techniques and software for compiling algorithms for fault-tolerant quantum computers. More generally, they are interested in developing ways, usually through simple toy-model simulations, to more easily explain and understand difficult concepts in quantum computing.
+
+**Christa Zoufal**
+Dr. Christa Zoufal is a quantum applications researcher in the Quantum Technology group at Quantum. In 2021 she received her PhD in Physics from ETH Zurich for a thesis on Generative Quantum Machine Learning. In her current research she focuses on advancing algorithmic and verification methods for quantum machine learning and quantum simulation both from a theoretical and from an empirical point of view. Additionally, she has served as advisor to the Unitary Fund Microgrant program since 2020.