When you're a 22-year-old doctoral student studying quantum science and engineering in the year 2023, the future looks full of extraordinary possibilities. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you wait until the future arrives to do extraordinary things.

That was Bao Bach’s approach as he flew to Delaware from Vietnam in July for his first year of graduate studies. He felt a little nervous, but also elated, to have found the University of Delaware’s quantum science and engineering graduate program — one of just a handful in the nation offering both master’s and doctorate  degrees.

Then, not long after arriving, Bach was back in the air — first to Chicago, where he was on the first-place hackathon team that cracked a mind-numbing, transistor-zapping quantum computing puzzle. Then, a few weeks later, he was off to Germany, where the Ho Chi Minh City native presented his research to a top-tier academic audience at the Munich Quantum Software Forum.

Considering these accomplishments came at a time when Bach could hardly navigate Newark, much less Munich, his jet-setting escapades seem all the more astonishing. The passion and potential that Bach shows are typical traits of students who are drawn to the program, UD professors say. Most are here because they are eager to join an energetic, far-forward-leaning field and know they can get the training for it hardly anywhere else.

In other words, Bach is not so much a standout as a snapshot — typical of the pioneering scholars who see UD as the right place to take on the challenges of realizing and exploiting quantum technologies.

"The challenges Bao faced at the Chicago hackathon line up extremely well with the educational goals of our programs,” said Matthew Doty, professor of materials science and engineering and director of UD’s quantum science and engineering graduate program. ‘’We know that the workforce that will take quantum technologies into the future needs a balance of skills and knowledge that aren’t provided by traditional disciplines. We designed our program to build a shared knowledge base and vocabulary that allows experts from many different disciplines to collaborate effectively to realize new quantum technologies.”

Bach was drawn to that cross-discipline approach soon after he saw a LinkedIn post about the program by one of its professors, Ilya Safro, who is also associate chair for graduate studies and research in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences.

“I had a look at UD’s program and I thought it was pretty cool, so I looked into the faculty and what they were researching and saw professor Safro led the track in quantum algorithms,” said Bach, who studies out of Safro’s lab. “His research is very aligned with my interests.”