Welcome to our Newest Microgrant Advisory Committee Members

Unitary Foundation is excited to welcome the newest additions to our 2026 Advisory Board!
Many in this global group of volunteer champions have been active participants in the UF community, from organizing in-person workshops to co-authoring research papers with the UF team. A subset of these advisors are also UF microgrant alumni who bring a special point of view to the application review and mentorship process.

The microgrant advisors are all experts in their fields, and they bring experience across the quantum technology stack and beyond. They work at academic research centers, corporate research divisions, and startups, both collaborating on large open source projects and having authored personal projects. Importantly, they all share our commitment to growing the community of open science and technology.

The advisory board will help source and review grant applications, mentor projects, and provide technical advice on UF’s research program. We are grateful for their help and are excited to bring them on board to recognize their contribution!

Below are the newest members of the committee. Continue scrolling to see the veteran advisors and UF staff rounding out the team.

A warm welcome to the newest advisors

Dr. Edoardo Altamura is a quantum software engineer and research scientist specializing in quantum algorithms and their applications to the natural sciences. He is a Principal Investigator in several award-winning STFC–HNCDI quantum computing projects, and a technical lead of Qiskit Machine Learning, one of the world’s most used open-source quantum applications libraries, with over one million downloads and thousands of active users. He also serves as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, where he co-leads collaborative work on quantum machine learning and quantum chemistry methods.

Coleman Collins is a professional product manager, semi-professional writer, and intermittent entrepreneur and angel investor. He serves as VP of Product Management, Quantum Computing at IonQ a leading public quantum technologies company. Before IonQ, Coleman was an innovation- and New Product Introduction (NPI)-focused strategic technology consultant, serving a variety of Fortune 50 and Global 500 clients across the banking, consumer technology, retail, and transportation sectors.

Dr. Leonardo Disilvestro has 10+ years of experience in quantum computing and holds a mathematical physics degree from the University of Edinburgh and a Ph.D. in quantum information theory from Telecom ParisTech. As Head of Integrations at Entropica Leonardo works at the interface between Entropica’s software stack and partners, with the goal of bringing fault-tolerant quantum computations closer. One partnership at a time!

Dr. Shangjie Guo is a quantum physicist and research leader whose work connects quantum algorithms, machine learning, and the foundations of quantum theory. With more than a decade of experience, he has contributed to quantum algorithm design, quantum computing hardware modeling, error mitigation, and theoretical quantum physics. Shangjie currently leads digital science and quantum computing strategy at bp, where he develops quantum approaches that bring business value to optimization, chemistry, sensing, and secure communication. He is also the president and co-founder of FinQ Tech, one of the largest quantum-technology communities in the United States, dedicated to education, innovation, and academia–industry collaboration.

Klem Jankiewicz is a design expert focused on making quantum computing more accessible through user-centered interfaces and visualization. As Head of Design at Classiq Technologies, she leads the product design of Classiq’s quantum algorithm development platform, creating intuitive graphical tools for quantum engineers and researchers. She co-founded Quantum Flytrap, an educational initiative supporting learning and experimentation in quantum technologies, and has collaborated with organizations including Pasqal, Xanadu, and the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore.

Dr. Charles Yuan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research examines the challenges of programming quantum computers and other emerging models of computation. His work has appeared in the ACM SIGPLAN POPL, OOPSLA, and PLDI conferences and has been recognized with the SIGPLAN Distinguished Artifact Award and the CQE-LPS Doc Bedard Fellowship.

Welcome back to our returning advisors

UF is lucky to have advisors who continue to contribute their time year after year to support explorers in the quantum computing space. Here are our continuing advisors for 2026.

Dr. Jamie Friel, Oxford Quantum Circuits
Dr. Sonika Johri, Coherent Computing Inc
Dr. Ryan LaRose, Michigan State University
Dr. Roger Luo, QuEra Computing Inc.
Dr. Ying Mao, Fordham University
Dr. Daniel Mills, Quantinuum
Elena Pena Tapia, IBM
Dr. Ryan Shaffer, AWS
Nate Stemen, University of Amsterdam
Jordan Sullivan, Independent Researcher

UF Staff

Brad Chase
Alessandro Cosentino
Farrokh Labib
Changhao Li
Vincent Russo
Nathan Shammah
Will Zeng
Ben Castanon
Veena Vijayakumar