3Qs: Dirk Englund on the Quantum Computing Track within 6-5, “Electrical Engineering With Computing”

September 4, 2024

Starting in Fall 2024, EECS is launching 6-5, “Electrical Engineering With Computing” as the sole new electrical engineering major. One of the signal changes of the new degree is the organization of upper-level classes into tracks, including an undergraduate engineering sequence in quantum engineering, where students learn the foundations of the quantum computing “stack” before creating their own quantum engineered systems in the lab.

Dirk Englund, Associate Professor in EECS, has been part of a team of instructors developing the quantum course sequence. “Back when I was an undergrad, I actually wanted to do cosmology. I wanted to understand how the universe works,” Englund says. “I went into the laboratory of one of my advisers, who had an atomic physics laboratory, and there on the optics table you could do experiments that looked at very fundamental questions like non-locality that I had thought were reserved for cosmology. That really pulled me in. So now I’m actually doing quantum information science in an electrical engineering and computer science department! We’re training the next generation of engineers because, after decades of work by different groups, we’re actually at the point where some of these technologies are getting deployed into the real world.” Those technologies range from quantum computers to quantum communications equipment to quantum sensors, all of which harness the surprising and bizarre principles of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement and non-locality of physics, to break new technological ground.