Bossley Park High School teachers have played “a fundamental part” in Pablo Bonilla Ataides’s stellar career path in quantum physics to date.

After solving a 20-year quantum computer problem while studying at Sydney University in 2021, the Bossley Park primary and high school alumnus, and now quantum scientist, will graduate from Harvard University in November with a PhD and the Goldhaber prize for best theory graduate student.

Pablo credits his high school teachers, particularly Maths teacher, David Foti, with having a defining influence on his physics career and speaks highly of his time at Bossley Park High School (on Darug Land).

“I have really fond memories from my time at Bossley Park. It was amazing. It was super productive,” Pablo said

“I always liked maths and when I was at Bossley Park High School, the teachers realised that I was completing my work, and I wanted more work, and they were super flexible. They ended up making an arrangement where I could complete extension one and extension 2 maths before year 10.

“The teachers not only tailored the program for me but also were amazing teachers and amazing mentors. Not only that, but Mr Foti also introduced me to some people at the University of Sydney.

“So, during the summer in year nine or after year 10, I worked as a summer intern at the University of Sydney in a quantum group … the group where we did all this amazing work. Without Mr Foti, I would not have gone down this path, and he was a fundamental part of me pursuing quantum physics.”

Pablo naturally went on to undergraduate studies in physics at Sydney University, where, in his second year, he tweaked some computing code to effectively double its capacity to correct errors in the quantum computers.

It was this simple but ingenious change to quantum error correcting code that grabbed the attention of quantum researchers at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena, California, and the quantum technology programs at Yale University and Duke University in the United States.

A Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarship in 2022 then secured Pablo a place at Harvard where his “research focused on quantum computing, specifically quantum error correction – the field devoted to making quantum computers reliable enough to solve practically important problems”.

“While quantum computers have enormous theoretical potential, they remain extremely susceptible to errors, making fault tolerance one of the central challenges in the field,” Pablo said.

“Working closely with the experimental neutral-atom quantum computing team at Harvard, my research develops new architectures and error-correction techniques that help bridge the gap between theoretical ideas and experimentally realizable quantum computers.”

For someone who “knew zero English back” when his family immigrated to Australia from Uruguay, his achievements can only be described as remarkable.

He went on to primary and high school at Bossley Park. And the rest is history.

“I had friends that I could hang out with at recess and lunch and have a really good time, but then I could also go to class and the content and the challenges that the teachers were putting in front of me were forcing me to improve,” Pablo said.