From Quant to Quantum: Two Paths into Industry

Speaker: Mikaela Gray, Flynn Edwards
Affiliation: University of Queensland

Abstract

This industry seminar will feature two students, Mikaela Gray and Flynn Edwards, sharing their perspectives and experiences on pathways into industry.

Mikaela will talk about how maths is used in finance and trading, following her experience as an intern at Optiver. This encompasses the practical use of probabilities, financial derivatives, and techniques of estimation, which show how mathematical ideas can be applied to real-world problems in fast-moving financial markets. She will discuss pathways into quantitative finance and trading for undergraduate, honours and masters students from maths, engineering and computer science backgrounds.

Flynn will describe how he could do the maths behind quantum computing and still could not build a quantum algorithm, and why he started Qubit Forge to fix that. He will cover what running a company during a degree involves and what employers have told him about getting into quantum.

Bio

Mikaela Gray is a recent UQ graduate from a Bachelor's of Mathematics (pure mathematics) / Arts (linguistics). She comes from an Olympiad mathematics background and has won various prizes in the Simon Marais Mathematics Competition at university. Last summer, she interned at Optiver (a financial markets firm) in the Trading stream and will return as a grad next year. 

Flynn Edwards is a computer science student at UQ and the founder and director of Qubit Forge, a Brisbane company he is building alongside his degree. Qubit Forge runs more than 120 auto-marked quantum coding challenges in Qiskit at qubitforge.com.au, and Flynn is now building short interactive modules that take learners from the maths to quantum algorithms.