AQC
Boutique deep tech consulting
Aspen Quantum Consulting
The team
The five scientific partners of the AQC team have roughly 100 years of experience, 500 publications and 35,000 citations in top journals among them.
The AQC team has supervised dozens of students and postdocs who have continued to key positions in academia and industry in topics related to quantum topics. Their professional network extends from peers at academic institutions to industry.
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The team is rounded out by deep legal expertise in high tech as well as in strategy consulting and financial markets.
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Collectively we have years of experience in reviewing research papers and proposals across the board in quantum sciences. Funding agencies around the world have relied on the opinion of the team, including the US NSF, DOE, ARO, Moore Foundation, the German DFG, the Israeli ISF, the European Research Council, and the Swiss NSF.
Charles W. Clark is an Emeritus Fellow and former Co-Director of the Joint Quantum Institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland. A retired career civil servant, Clark held a variety of technical and management positions at NIST and the Office of Naval Research, United States Navy. While in the Senior Executive Service, he received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive. Clark has held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, Australian National University, National University of Singapore and University of Malaya. With Victor Galitski, he co-designed and taught “Exploring Quantum Physics” on the Coursera platform. Clark designed and teaches the “Quantum Boot Camp,” an introductory course of the University of Maryland Quantum Information Specialization. He has served on the boards of the Institute of Quantum Computing (Canada) and the Centre for Quantum Technologies (Singapore), and in 2023 he joined the Board of Advisors for ScienceCast, Inc. Clark is co-investigator on a recent proposal by ScienceCast to the National Science Foundation entitled “Proto-OKN Theme 1: Quantum Understanding through Accessible Resource Knowledge Graphs (QUARK).”
Dr. Yuval Oreg has been a Professor of Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science for over 20 years, where he served as Chair of the Weizmann Council of Professors (2020-2022) and is currently the Director of the Goldschleger Center for Nanophysics and holds the Lady Davis Professorial Chair of Physics. After earning his Ph.D. at Weizmann, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Lyman Institute and later a visiting professor at Stanford. Yuval received the Michael Bruno Memorial Award from the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, the Segre Rosa and Emilio Research Award, the Morris L. Levinson Prize in Physics, the Bessel Prize of the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the John F. Kennedy Prize of the Feinberg Graduate School at the Weizmann Institute, and the Fulbright and Rothschild fellowships. Yuval is a co-inventor (with Gil Refael) of the topological qubit of qubit technology that is a basis of Microsoft’s $1 Billion quantum computing effort. He is one of the world’s leading experts in nanotechnology and a key member of major European scientific collaborations with elite access to the European and Israeli quantum communities.
Chief Research Scientist
Research Scientist
Dr. Narang is a Professor of Physics who leads an interdisciplinary group in theoretical and computational science at UCLA. Before her move to UCLA, she was a Professor of Computational Materials Science at Harvard University. Dr. Narang has earned prestigious honors such as the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, MRS’ Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award, Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, Bessel Research Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Moore Inventor Fellowship. Additionally, she is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Aliro, a company specializing in quantum networks, and a U.S. Science Envoy for the State Department.
Research Scientist
Dr. Galitski is the Chesapeake Chair Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and Fellow at the Joint Quantum Institute there; honorary professor of physics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia; and Editor of Annals of Physics. He holds two PhDs: in applied mathematics and quantum physics. Victor is an author of more than 150 peer-reviewed publications in quantum physics that have been cited over 10,000 times. He is also an author of Exploring Quantum Mechanics (Oxford University Press, 2013). Partly based on this book, Victor has developed and taught a massive open online course, “Exploring Quantum Physics,” which has been taken by over 100,000 students world-wide. Victor received the Simons Investigator Award, Soros Fellowship, NSF career award, and Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. His research in many-body quantum physics has been funded by the DOE, NSF, U.S. Army Research Office, IARPA, DARPA, and private foundations. Dr. Galitski is the CEO of ScienceCast, Inc.
Research Scientist
Dr. Nikolayev, a former academic, is a polymath and a polyglot. He is also a digital marketing expert and founder of Science Marketer, a marketing firm serving deep tech d sci-tech companies. He holds two degrees in history from Harvard, a PhD in academic editing from Boston University’s Editorial Institute, and has taught at both universities. A former techie who worked as a software engineer in the past, he pursues his diverse interests in mathematics, logic, science, and analytical philosophy. Last but not least, Philip is an internationally published, prize-winning poet, literary translator, and editor.
Director of Business Development
AQC’s cofounder, Mr. Jiranek is an experienced corporate attorney who has worked with startups and emerging companies for over 30 years. He has helped many management teams, both inhouse and as outside counsel, to structure, start-up and develop new business enterprises in deep tech and life sciences. He has assisted them with protecting IP, raising working capital and building out scientific and management teams. Mr. Jiranek is well versed in national and international tax, IP, securities, employment, regulatory, real estate and contractual issues encountered by emerging enterprises. He has assisted with raising capital from individual, institutional, public and quasi-public sources. While managing ScienceCast’s emerging phase, Mr. Jiranek also undertakes business development and legal work for select corporate clients. Mr. Jiranek graduated from William and Mary Law School with a J.D. and from Princeton with an A.B. in Economics.
President of Operations
Dr. John Beverley is an established expert at the intersection of knowledge graph engineering, formal logic, and semantic web technologies. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Buffalo researching topics at the intersection of Applied Ontology and formal logic and he is a Vice President of the National Center for Ontological Research. Prior to that position, he was a Senior Ontologist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where he remains an Ontology Consultant. Dr. Beverley received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2021 in Philosophy, a Masters in Philosophy from the State University of New York, at Buffalo in 2017, and a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy and Logic from NC State University in 2011.
Research Scientist
Shimon is an Assistant Professor of Physics at University of Wisconsin - Madison and also serves as a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Engineering there. Shimon is the recipient of the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Lectureship Award, Outstanding Presentation Award, NIST Boulder Laboratories Postdoctoral Poster Symposium, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Shimon was a National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellow at JILA and NIST at the University of Colorado. He earned his PhD in experimental physics at Harvard. His research interests include precision measurement, nanoscale sensing, metrology, timekeeping, tests of relativity, and quantum optics.
Partner
Dr. Refael is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He earned a B.S. in math and physics from Tel-Aviv University in 1997. He did his graduate studies at Harvard University (supervised by Profs. Daniel S. Fisher and Eugene Demler) and obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics in 2003. After being a postdoctoral fellow at the KITP, UC Santa Barbara, for two years, he joined the physics faculty at Caltech. His research interests involve a variety of problems of correlated quantum matter, both disordered and out of equilibrium. Gil is also grateful for current support as a Cottrell Scholar and a Packard Fellow.
Research Scientist
Dr. Steinn Sigurðsson serves as Scientific Director at arXiv, the world's premier scientific data repository and is Professor of Astronomy at Penn State University. With over 100 publications in astronomy and astrophysics, garnering nearly 10,000 citations, his research is recognized and funded by institutions like NASA and NSF. Alongside Dr. Galitski, he contributes to the board of the Aspen Center for Physics and spearheads its private fundraising. At arXiv, Dr. Sigurðsson not only shapes long-term strategies but also founded and directs arXiv Labs, fostering community contributions and innovative tools like Litmaps, Connected Papers, and Hugging Face.
Research Scientist
Our strategic advisory work and consulting engagements include assisting emerging companies with commercializing their quantum technology. One of the ways we help our client companies is by providing client management with advice and assistance with formulating and articulating their investment proposition to potential customers and investors. We can help with identifying customers and optimizing client technology for these customers. We can also help with developing materials that validate and describe the commercial opportunities offered by a client's quantum technology. We are well regarded experts with an established network of contacts in the field of quantum research. We know how to evaluate, describe and optimize quantum technology and we know where to steer it. We bring credibility and validation to our clients, which is crucial to attracting capital investment.