Transforming Ideas into Impact: High-Tech Leadership Across Academia and Industry

SUTD Trailblazers’ Series

A fireside chat with Prof Kae Nemoto and Dr Patricia Lee

Join us for a thought-provoking fireside chat with Professor Kae Nemoto and Dr Patricia Lee. From campus to quantum leadership, hear their challenges, breakthroughs and the lessons that shaped their journey!

Date: 9 January 2026, Friday

Time: 2.00PM to 4.00PM (seated by 1.50PM)

Venue: SUTD Lecture Theatre 2 (Building 1, Level 3)

Dress code: Smart casual

Registration closes: 5 January 2026

Speakers

Professor Kae Nemoto

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)

Director, OIST Center for Quantum Technologies

Kae Nemoto is a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and the Center Director for OIST Center for Quantum Technologies. She is also a professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, where she serves as the director of the Global Research Center for Quantum Information Science and the co-director of the Japanese-French Laboratory for Informatics (JFLI). Her research is focused on applications for quantum computer architectures, quantum machine learning, quantum middleware, quantum devices, quantum networks, quantum internet and complex systems.

Prof Nemoto is leading several national research projects in the field of quantum information science and current technology, and is the founding leader of the educational platform “Quantum Academy for Science and Technology”, which provides high-quality lectures and education materials at the undergraduate and graduate levels in this field. She is also a founder of Quantum Forum in Japan.

Her effort has also been devoted to the implementation of quantum technology and its ecosystem in the industry. She is currently leading two industry-academia ecosystem platforms funded by the Japanese government. She is a Fellow of both the IoP (UK) and the APS (US). She was appointed to the National Order of Merit of the French Republic in 2022, and received the Science and Technology Award in the Research category from MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) in 2025.

Dr Patricia Lee

Chief Scientist for Product Technologies, Quantinuum

Dr Patricia Lee is the Chief Scientist for Product Technologies at Quantinuum, where she leads the technology roadmap effort to scale up trapped ion quantum computers and achieve fault-tolerance. She is best known for her work on phase control of geometric phase gates in trapped ions.

Prior to joining Quantinuum (formerly Honeywell Quantum Solutions) in 2016, Dr Lee’s experimental research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) includes quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum network with neutral atoms. She holds a PhD in atomic physics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a BSc in physics from California Institute of Technology.

This is brought to you as part of the 2026 Global Young Scientists Summit (GYSS) organised by the National Research Foundation (NRF).