Sean Howell

about

I’m a researcher and engineer. I’m currently a Principal Engineer at PsiQuantum, where most of my time goes to thinking about fault-tolerance, quantum error correction, architectures, and the role AI plays across all of them. I’ve also had a hand in simulation, compilation, and a wide variety of systems software as part of the effort to build a utility-scale quantum computer.

Most of my career has been focused on problems at the intersection of physics, scientific and systems software, novel or otherwise strange hardware, and artificial intelligence. This has spanned a variety of applications and flavors including robotics, sensors, and, for the last seven years, quantum computing. I’ve also led multidisciplinary research and engineering teams at PsiQuantum, AWS, and Q-CTRL, founding technical programs, growing organizations, and working across research, software, hardware, and product.

Much of my recent work lives at the AI corner of that intersection: neural decoders and reinforcement learning for fault-tolerant quantum computing, autonomous systems for scientific research and complex hardware, and the formal methods, compilers, and verification infrastructure needed to make them reliable.