June 26, 2026 -- The University of Iowa has been selected as a member of a consortium advancing a national effort focused on next‑generation quantum sensing.

Iowa will be included with several other higher education research institutions that won a $4 million, two‑year Phase II design award from the National Science Foundation. The award was announced June 24. The funding will bring together top researchers and partners to push quantum technologies toward real‑world use, particularly in understanding materials and molecules with unprecedented precision.

The consortium is the only one announced by the NSF that is focused on quantum sensing, emerging technologies that could open up a host of new applications in biomedicine and health care, geology, materials research, mineral exploration, navigation, astronomy, and computing.

The research at Iowa will be led by Michael Flatté, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He says his team’s role is to design the materials and devices to be developed and evaluated by the consortium.

Flatté’s group will concentrate its efforts on:

• Fundamental research on the use of quantum entanglement to gain advantage in quantum sensors.
• Creating a road map to technology that will provide a clear quantum advantage by evaluating the metrics for several competing technologies.

“The key goal is a clear demonstration that this technology is superior to all nonquantum competitors for a given application of relevance,” Flatté says. “Thus, our assessment of the metrics for quantum sensors and how they compare with other technologies will direct the team toward specific demonstrations intended to give the NSF a ‘win’ in developing quantum technology.”

Iowa’s funding share is $240,000, although Flatté notes that there could be more funding if the NSF judges this phase of research as successful.

Ohio State University is the lead institution on the award. The other partners in the consortium are Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Chicago; University of California, Santa Barbara; and University of Colorado Boulder, along with external workforce and translation partners QuSTEAM and QuantCAD.

The project, “Distributed-Entanglement Quantum Sensing of Chemical Properties,” or DQS-CP, is part of NSF’s National Quantum Virtual Laboratory program. The team is developing a flexible sensing platform built from three main pieces: the molecule being studied, a thin “spin‑relay” layer that carries information, and a quantum readout. By carefully entangling parts of this system, researchers can push measurement performance beyond conventional limits.