INQA Exchange Visit Experiences

INQA has offered network members the opportunity for funded trips to other institutions where INQA members are active. The funding was used to fund travel, accommodation and some subsistence costs. 

Zeynab Kaseb visits the UK

As I approach the final stage of my PhD journey, I find myself at a pivotal point reflecting on the path ahead and where I can contribute most meaningfully as a researcher.

With generous support from the UCL Quantum Science and Technology Institute and Delft University of Technology, I had the invaluable opportunity to present and discuss our ongoing research at TU Delft | Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science where we are addressing modern power system challenges using scientific machine learning and quantum computing paradigms.

The tour included visits to the University of Oxford, The University of Sheffield, and The University of Edinburgh, as well as participation in the White Rose QSIT workshop at the University of Leeds. I was also delighted to visit the London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL in May 2025. 

I’m deeply grateful for the continuous support and mentorship from my supervisory team, Peter Palensky, Matthias Möller, and Pedro P. Vergara, and for the insightful conversations and support from Paul Warburton, Thomas Morstyn, Oleksandr Kyriienko, and Raul Garcia-Patron Sanchez.

Sebastian Schulz visits UCL

In March 2025, I spent two weeks visiting Paul Warburton’s research group at UCL. During my stay, I gave a seminar on iterative quantum annealing, in which I demonstrated how adaptive changes to an optimisation problem can mitigate first-order phase transitions during adiabatic evolution. In collaboration with Natasha Feinstein and Roopayan Ghosh, we discovered many connections between our research and developed the idea of a quantum annealing toolbox to enable practical quantum optimisation on today’s hardware. We used toy problems to demonstrate the feasibility of our idea, and a collaboration on a research paper is planned for the future.

About myself: I am a research assistant and PhD student at the Research Centre Jülich, Germany. I have a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Physics from RWTH Aachen University.

Aitor Gomez-Tejedor visits UBC & D-Wave

In November 2024, Aitor Gómez-Tejedor, a PhD student at Tecnalia Research and Innovation and the University of the Basque Country, visited the University of British Columbia (UBC) and D-Wave Systems Inc., and met with the team at the Quantum Algorithms Institute (QAI) in Vancouver, Canada.

At UBC, Aitor collaborated with Professor Steve Wilton, as well as Dr. Jose Pinilla from QAI. Together, they launched a new project addressing problem decomposition and minor-embedding in quantum annealing. The project was presented at the UBC and D-Wave, where future collaboration opportunities between Tecnalia, QAI, UBC, and D-Wave were explored.

Aitor holds a BSc in Mathematics and an MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Research, Statistics and Computation from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He is currently pursuing his PhD as a Junior Researcher at Tecnalia Research and Innovation.

Kumar Saurav visits Tokyo

In October 2024, Kumar Saurav, PhD student at University of Southern California (USC) visited Tokyo to attend the INQA conference held at MIRAIKAN, Odaiba. He extended this visit by giving a seminar at RIKEN and interacting with quantum computing researchers working there.
During his time in Tokyo Saurav gave a talk on using smooth analytic controls to preserve arbitrary properties of quantum states.
Saurav is a PhD student in Prof. Daniel Lidar’s group at USC. Prior to USC, he completed his BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay, and worked as a software engineering at Google before transitioning to research in quantum computing. 

Merlin Nau visits UCL

Merlin Nau, a Computer Science PhD student at the Pattern Recognition Lab at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, visited UCL in June 2024.

At UCL, Merlin gave a seminar on the applications of quantum annealing in medical imaging. Together with Bruno Camino, Luca Nutricati, and Paul Warburton, he worked on limiting the connectivity of the quantum annealing device for feature selection. Merlin’s stay at UCL was followed by his attendance at the Adiabatic Quantum Computing Conference in Glasgow, where he caught up on the latest developments in quantum annealing, visited research labs, and networked with the community.

Prior to starting his PhD, Merlin completed his Master’s thesis at Northwestern University. He holds both a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Medical Engineering from FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Matthias Werner visits UCL

In September 2022, Matthias Werner, Software Engineer from Barcelona based quantum annealing start-up Qilimanjaro, visited UCL. He extended this visit by spending a week visiting labs and researchers across the UK active in quantum annealing.

During his time at UCL Matthias gave a seminar on a graph-theoretical analysis on first order quantum phase transitions for adiabatic quantum computing.

Mattias was a machine learning scientist at dida Datenschmiede, Berlin before joining Qilimanjaro. He holds an MSc from FU Berlin and a BSc in Physics from the University of Oldenburgh.