Alice & Bob Joins QuBriC to Train Europe’s Quantum Error Fixers

Alice & Bob has joined QuBriC, Europe’s first Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network dedicated to quantum error correction, as the programme recruits 15 doctoral researchers across 23 partners with roughly €4.7 million in Horizon Europe funding over 48 months.

The move links the Paris-based cat-qubit company to a continent-wide effort that treats the talent shortage itself as the binding constraint on fault-tolerant machines.

Europe’s First Full-Stack QEC Doctoral Network

QuBriC stands for Bridging Quantum and Classical Error Correction for Scalable Fault-tolerant Quantum Computing. It is the first pan-European MSCA Doctoral Network built solely around QEC. TU/e researcher Gabriele Liga coordinates the effort from Eindhoven.

The consortium unites 16 universities and research institutes with seven quantum companies. Academic hosts include ETH Zürich, TU Delft, UCL, INRIA, KIT, Freie Universität Berlin, Chalmers, University of Edinburgh, Sorbonne Université and others. Industry partners are Riverlane, IQM, Alice & Bob, Quantinuum, Pasqal, QuiX Quantum and Quandela.

Each of the 15 doctoral candidates receives a full 48-month appointment. They will move between academic and industrial secondments, working the full stack from classical coding theory and quantum information to hardware implementation and decoding.

Vacancies are live. The network’s own site lists open positions such as soft-decision QEC codes hosted at TU/e with secondments to Riverlane, and photonic and bosonic architectures at TU Delft.

Only Hundreds of Specialists for a Global Bottleneck

Quantum computers still make errors roughly once every few hundred operations. Real-time quantum error correction is now widely viewed as the foundation for any useful machine. Hardware progress has accelerated, yet the people who can design, decode and implement the codes remain scarce.

Riverlane’s QEC Report 2025, drawn from interviews with 25 experts including Nobel laureate John Martinis, puts the current global pool of dedicated QEC professionals at only an estimated 600-700 QEC specialists worldwide. The same report projects demand of 5,000 to 16,000 by 2030. Training a specialist can take up to a decade.

• 600-700 current QEC specialists globally
• 5,000-16,000 specialists needed by 2030
• Up to 10 years typical specialised training time
• Real-time decoders under 1 microsecond latency flagged as critical hardware bottleneck

Expertise has long split between classical coding theorists and quantum physicists. Few people span both plus the hardware constraints of specific qubit types. QuBriC’s explicit goal is to produce researchers who can operate across that entire stack.

Companies already run ad-hoc student hackathons and short courses because the formal pipeline lags. A structured, multi-year, multi-institution doctoral network is the slower but deeper answer.

Cat Qubits Meet the Classical Coding Side

Alice & Bob specialises in cat qubits, superconducting devices whose physics already suppress bit-flip errors. The company has shown architectures that can reduce hardware needs by up to 200 times compared with competing approaches for running algorithms such as Shor’s. Later work on Elevator Codes aims at far lower logical error rates with only modest extra qubit overhead.

As an industry partner the company will shape research directions and host secondments. Its Principal Research Scientist for QEC, Christophe Vuillot, framed the need clearly.

Quantum error correction sits at the heart of any fault-tolerant quantum computer, interacting with all aspects of it. As such, it requires expertise spanning seemingly separate disciplines. QuBriC brings together leading universities, research institutes and quantum companies to train researchers and bridge these gaps, combining expertise from quantum information, coding theory and hardware engineering. This next generation of researchers will be essential to accelerating the path to useful, fault-tolerant quantum computers.

Vuillot’s statement matches the network’s design. For Alice & Bob the return is a direct pipeline of people already fluent in both the company’s biased-noise hardware and the wider coding literature.

Founded in 2020, the firm has grown to more than 250 people and raised substantial private capital while publishing steadily on codes tailored to cats. Placing those codes inside a European doctoral programme multiplies the number of researchers who can improve them.

How the MSCA Model Moves Researchers Across Borders

Unlike single-lab grants, MSCA Doctoral Networks fund international consortia that jointly recruit, train and supervise PhD candidates. Candidates spend time in both academic and industrial settings and gain transferable skills alongside technical depth.

The programme itself is marking 30 years in 2026. Since 1996 it has supported over 150000 researchers including 23 Nobel winners. Mobility across countries, disciplines and sectors is the core mechanism.

QuBriC follows that template exactly: 14 beneficiaries and 9 associated partners, secondments built into every project, and an explicit gender-equality officer. TU/e’s share of the budget is about €610,000. The total EU contribution sits near €4.7 million, slightly higher than some early press roundings of €4.6 million.

Positions opened after the grant agreement was signed in July 2026. Candidates will start research while the hardware platforms they study continue to advance.

Who Gains From a Shared European Pipeline

Universities gain industrial realism and co-supervision. Startups and larger quantum firms gain researchers who already understand multiple platforms and the decoding problem that sits between them.

Riverlane, another QuBriC partner and the author of the talent report, builds real-time QEC stacks used across qubit modalities. IQM, Pasqal, Quandela and QuiX bring their own hardware flavours. The network therefore trains people who can compare and transfer ideas rather than stay locked inside one company’s stack.

For Alice & Bob the alignment is especially tight. Cat qubits change the noise bias that codes must handle. Researchers who train on both the physics and the classical coding side leave ready to contribute immediately.

• Academic labs receive seconded industrial insight and joint publications
• Hardware companies receive PhDs already fluent in their noise models
• Decoder and software firms receive people who understand both ends of the stack
• Europe retains more of the scarce specialist talent it trains

The 15 researchers will not solve the global shortfall alone. They set a template that can be repeated and they create a cohort whose members already know one another across borders.

Fifteen Researchers and the Next Five Years

QuBriC is recruiting now. Its site lists 15 fully funded PhD positions now open with host institutions and secondment partners named. Successful candidates will spend four years moving between theory groups, coding labs and company floors.

By the time they finish, the hardware landscape will look different. Google’s 2024 demonstration that QEC can reduce errors in practice, the flood of new code papers in 2025, and continued gains in cat-qubit lifetimes all point to faster experimental cycles. The missing ingredient remains people who can turn those cycles into system-level designs.

Europe has chosen to treat that missing ingredient as a joint infrastructure project rather than a pure market problem. Alice & Bob’s entry supplies one of the sharpest industrial testbeds inside that project. The second-order effect is a generation of researchers who treat classical codes, quantum information and real devices as a single craft.

That craft is still rare. Fifteen new practitioners will not saturate demand. They will, however, arrive already networked across the labs and companies that need them most.