The Deloitte Quantum Climate Challenge is a six-week annual competition to explore how quantum technologies can address climate change. The 2024 challenge focused on improving disaster prediction methods, flood forecasting and climate resilience using quantum computing.

The competition concluded with a final pitch event held in Düsseldorf this month. A team from the Imperial Quantum Society (Imperial QTSoc) combined their diverse backgrounds to develop a scalable hybrid quantum-machine-learning framework for environmental risk control, winning first place in the competition and receiving a €5000 prize.

The winning team included four PhD students: Louis Chen from the Department of Materials, Felix Burt from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Michael Ho and Lily Lee from the Department of Civil Engineering. Their innovative approach leveraged NVIDIA's computing resources and impressed a panel of judges that included experts from AWS and D-Wave and professionals in the sustainability sector.

The second-place team in the competition included Abraham Lin, a first-year undergraduate student from Imperial Quantum Society, further highlighting the success of Imperial's students in the event.