Gideon Uchehara might have taken a different path to quantum science, had he known more about it. As a student in Nigeria, there may have been opportunities to explore quantum science and technology, but he wasn’t aware of them. Now, he is building Blacks in Quantum, a network to connect other Black leaders in quantum science in order to make the opportunities he wished he had more available to Black scholars.
“Quantum science, and quantum computing needs Black people,” said Uchehara, a PhD student in the NSERC CREATE Program in Quantum Computing. “We will not be able to solve the world’s problems while seeing those problems from a limited perspective. Quantum computing needs Black perspectives.”
Uchehara is studying quantum machine learning at the University of British Columbia; he completed his Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University. After McGill, he worked at Ballard on fuel cell systems.
“I realized that even though it was interesting work, it wasn’t for me,” said Uchehara. As luck would have it, he saw a post about the CREATE program from Lukas Chrostowski on LinkedIn: “It hit me: this is exactly what I had been looking for,” he said.