SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, & MATHEMATICS A Quantum Leap Matea Leahy, inaugural recipient of the Microsoft Scholarship for the MSc in Quantum Science and Technology, talks quantum logistics and why it’s so important to have female role models in STEM Matea Leahy M atea Leahy was in her final year of her degree in applied computational maths when she discovered quantum science: ‘It’s mind-boggling when you get into it, a way of looking at the world through a different kind of knowledge.’ It’s a way of looking at the world which is generating increasing excitement among industry and policy makers. Quantum computers can solve, in a matter of seconds, problems that would take the fastest computers today thousands of years. This gives quantum the potential to revolutionise technology and address key societal challenges in healthcare, energy, environmental systems, smart materials and beyond, although significant research is still required to realise the ‘quantum advantage’. Trinity has established an Msc in Quantum Science and Technology through the government’s Human Capital Initiative (HCI), which looks to increase higher education capacity in priority programmes. Microsoft - which It’s mind-bog you get int of looking a through a di of know recently announced a full- stack, open-cloud quantum computing system named Azure Quantum - is providing funding to support quantum PhD students in Trinity and has also established a female scholarship programme for the MSc as part of a broad societal effort to attract more women to STEM. Matea Leahy, one of the inaugural two recipients of the Microsoft scholarships, confirms that there are only two women on the MSc to nine men, ‘but in my undergraduate course [in UCD], we were just three women to 17 men’ and in school in Sligo she had to travel from her all-girls school to the boys school to do applied maths. ‘To be fair, it wasn’t a big class, only 7 of us, but yes it says a lot that I was the only girl.’ Her mother worked as a computer programmer and web designer, so she never saw maths through a gender lens. She is conscious of the importance of female role
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