Cori Williams was a high school student who liked theater and dance and had a talent for math that blossomed into skill as a programmer. She won some awards, impressed IonQ’s software team while in college, and joined our internship program for the summer of 2020. She’s now working full-time for IonQ, helping to create and improve the software that controls the lasers in our trapped-ion quantum computers.
“I love being able to learn new things every day,” Williams says. “I knew nothing about quantum physics when I started, and I think it’s such a privilege to sit down with world-class PhDs and listen to them explain quantum physics and quantum computing. You don’t normally get to learn a whole new field while you’re designing software.”
Williams is currently responsible for creating a database that holds the laser settings necessary to run gates on the ions. Because physicists calibrate these settings regularly, she also works closely with them to create an intuitive and efficient way to access and augment the data. The different laser setups in our multiple generations of ion traps offer an ongoing challenge as we iterate towards more powerful, stable and accurate systems. This project in particular constituted a large part of the software improvements necessary to create Forte, the world’s first software configurable quantum computer.