Biography

Having lived in a variety of countries - Belgium, Cameroon, the USA, and Kazakhstan - has given me a chance to see firsthand the diverse set of problems our global society faces. Growing up, I was motivated by broad endeavors like developing renewable energy sources to allow Cameroon to provide reliable electricity to the most remote parts of their country, lowering the cost of biomedical products so that millions in Kazakhstan have access to basic healthcare, and improving transportation in congested cities in Belgium and the USA. Starting college, I wondered whether there was a path which would allow me to contribute to all of these causes. When I was introduced to quantum computing, I realized this technology had the potential to bring drastic improvements throughout society, especially in the fields of medicine (sequencing DNA), energy (modeling photovoltaics), and transportation (enabling artificial intelligence). This is because quantum computers, using nature's strange phenomena such as "superposition" and "entanglement", could solve in minutes what would take today's best supercomputers the age of the universe to solve. At Cambridge, I aim to study how color centers in diamond can operate as qubits, the essential building blocks of quantum computers. As part of the Gates community and beyond, I hope to engage with scholars from other fields to bring together our various passions towards the common goal of providing new solutions to society's most pressing issues.