Meet the mentors of QG22!

At Quantum Games 2022 course, students create games based on their own ambition and skill levels, or based on how much time they have at hand to learn a new skill. In order to ease this process, we have again collected a great group of mentors helping the teams at the course’s Discord. All of our mentors have created some kind of quantum games, others with quantum physicist background and others with game developer background.

Samuli Jääskeläinen (Varjo) is an experienced game developer, game jam enthusiast and a creator of over 100 games. Samuli has been traveling the world trying to do a game jam on every continent. When he is not jamming, he is pushing the boundaries of modern virtual and augmented reality at Varjo Technologies. Samuli has experience in programming games from 80’s video game consoles to modern quantum computers and everything in between.

Originally from the UK, Jorden Senior (IST Austria) completed his PhD at Aalto University in 2019 studying the interactions of heat and superconducting qubits, making pioneering experiments in the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics, sometimes affectionately referred to as quantum steampunk. He has since moved to Vienna to build a laboratory established by Prof. Andrew Higginbotham to study phase transitions in quantum devices, using techniques from the superconducting quantum computing and optomechanics communities. He has participated both as a jammer and a mentor in multiple quantum gam jams, producing games such as Q|Cards> and the Quantum Dice, as well as several classical game jams.

Aashish Sah (Aalto University) is a doctoral student at QCD Labs in the department of Applied Physics at Aalto University. Aashish’s work is related to optimal control of superconducting qubits for the implementation of energy-efficient quantum computing. Besides research, Aashish is very enthusiastic about teaching and hopes to make quantum mechanics as accessible as classical mechanics to the incipient learners. Sah’s contribution to the Quantum Games course will be mainly towards the conceptual side of quantum mechanics. However, he has a decent amount of experience with Python and Qiskit that may, hopefully, be helpful to the students during their programming exercises.

Marcel Pfaffhauser (IBM Research – Zurich) studied computer science at ETH Zurich, with specialization in theory of computing. Afterwards he worked as a teaching and research assistant at the University Svizzera italiana in Lugano in the field of Quantum Information Theory. He then left research to work as a Unity Developer for 5 years, where he was focused on AR VR and Gamification. In 2020, he joined IBM Research in Zurich to work in the Quantum Education Team.

Samanvay Sharma (Keio University) is a masters student with the Advancing Quantum Architecture (AQUA) group at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. With research interests in quantum computing as well as quantum community building and education advocacy, he first got to interact with quantum games with Qiskit such as QPong, QiskitBlocks and Hello Quantum. Since then he has hosted and supported multiple quantum game jams and events for quantum computing and game development communities.

Laura Piispanen (Aalto University), also our teacher on this course, is working on a joint PhD between Computer Science Department and the Applied Physics Department at Aalto University on her research on quantum games and is also finishing a masters degree in the University of Turku on Computer Science, focusing on interaction design and games. She has her first on-site Quantum Game Jam experience from 2019 as one of the organizers and has since then been involved with developing a citizen science game prototype designed for a quantum optimal control problem, a VR-experience that is based on a numerical simulation of quantum networks and other game and art projects related with quantum physics and quantum computing.

Daria Anttila (University of Turku), also our teacher on this course, is a PhD student doing her research on the topic “Education in Quantum Physics”. The main focus of her research is on interest: how we can use students’ already existing interests in teaching quantum physics and how we can spark students’ interest in quantum physics and maintain it. Daria is active also in outreach. She has been organizing multiple events for university students and school students, worked once as a guide in a quantum physics exhibition, and took part in organizing Online Quantum Game Jam 2021. Her secret superpower is already prepared lecture presentations for almost every cool quantum physics (and even some cosmology) topics suitable for any audience.