LANL quantum summer school starts, Xanadu returns to mentor students

Los Alamos National Laboratory opened its quantum computing summer school with a small but pointed goal: build the next generation of quantum talent in the county where one of the country’s premier science laboratories already sits. Xanadu returned to mentor students alongside LANL experts, a sign that the program is as much about workforce development as it is about research.

The 10-week school runs from June 8 through August 14 and is built around what LANL describes as an immersive curriculum. Students get tutorials from leading quantum-computation experts, plus one-on-one mentoring from staff scientists who are actively working in the field. They also get hands-on practice programming commercial quantum computers from IBM, QuEra, IonQ, Quantinuum and D-Wave, a rare opportunity for students who want to move from theory into real systems.

For Los Alamos, the payoff is more immediate than a standard summer class. The school sits inside LANL’s broader quantum ecosystem, alongside the Quantum Institute and a newly formed quantum computing-focused research center that will also host the program. That structure ties student training directly to the laboratory’s own research needs, helping create a pipeline of people who may eventually work in Los Alamos in physics, computer science, applied mathematics or adjacent STEM fields.

This year’s mentorship team included Torin Stetina and Vasilis Belis, both from Xanadu’s algorithms team, who are collaborating with students on high-impact research projects. Their return adds an industry view to a program that has become one of the more selective quantum internships in the country. LANL says the school can enroll up to 25 students a year, and in 2024 it said nearly 700 applicants competed for just 21 spots.

The school has existed since 2018 and has drawn students from around the world with backgrounds in physics, chemistry, computer science and applied mathematics. Past projects have covered quantum machine learning, error mitigation and classical simulation of quantum systems, while previous invited speakers have come from IBM, Amazon, MIT, Harvard, EPFL, Pasqal and Xanadu.

For Los Alamos County, that matters because quantum computing is no longer an abstract research niche. It is becoming a workforce field, and the students spending their summer at LANL are being trained in the same tools and problems that will shape the lab’s next decade.