July 15, 2024 -- UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Prof. Andrew Cleland has been named a 2024 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow, the U.S. Department of Defense’s flagship single-investigator award for basic research.

Each of the 11 tenured faculty members named as fellows will receive $3 million over five years to pursue ambitious, innovative, and groundbreaking “blue sky” research.

Cleland said he will use the fellowship money to support research at PME’s Cleland Lab in an “area of quantum information that has received very little attention to date,” using mechanical vibrations known as phonons to build fast, powerful, game-changing quantum computers.

“Mechanical vibrations offer a unique opportunity for quantum computing with potentially much higher reliability and a much smaller footprint than other approaches,” he said. “This would create a quantum computing format that has long been theoretically envisioned but for which no suitable platform has been found.”

Phonon-based quantum computing, Cleland said, promises a potentially faster route to quantum computing with easier requirements than other hardware platforms, with direct impacts in computing, simulation, and information security.