The Institute was co-founded by two researchers who share a conviction that the most important work at the frontier of quantum and AI demands both deep theoretical understanding and the discipline to build things that work.
Maia builds at the intersection of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and systems architecture. Her work is defined by a dual commitment: to understand complex systems at the level of their mathematical and statistical foundations, and to translate that understanding into tools that others can genuinely learn from and extend.
Her research focuses on hybrid quantum-classical learning systems, a class of architectures that remains technically demanding and pedagogically underserved. She is particularly interested in the interpretability of such systems: what it means to understand what a quantum-influenced model has learned, and how that understanding can be made legible to the people who use it.
Alongside the technical work, Maia leads the Institute's pedagogical mission. She believes that the hardest and most valuable thing an institution can do is make difficult ideas genuinely teachable, not by simplifying them, but by finding the frameworks that make their complexity navigable. That work shapes everything the Institute publishes and builds.
She co-founded the C.D. Fichtenholtz-Waals Research Institute in 2026 with Mads van der Waals, with the conviction that the field needed an institution willing to build as rigorously as it theorizes.
Mads is an experimental physicist whose work sits at the boundary between quantum hardware and the theoretical foundations that make quantum computing possible. He is drawn to the gap between what quantum systems can do in principle and what they can be made to do reliably in practice, and to the mathematical structures that determine where that gap lies.
His research focuses on the physical implementation of quantum systems and on the symbolic and mathematical frameworks needed to reason clearly about their behavior. He is particularly interested in how insights from experimental physics can inform the design of hybrid quantum-classical architectures, and in the role of symbolic reasoning in making such systems interpretable.
Mads brings to the Institute a commitment to rigor that begins at the hardware level. He believes that the most durable contributions to quantum AI will come from researchers who understand the physics, not just the abstraction layers built on top of it, and that building those foundations carefully is the Institute's most important long-term work.
He co-founded the C.D. Fichtenholtz-Waals Research Institute in 2026 with Maia Fichtenholtz Sek.