Amara Okonjo

Amara founded Ruqi Lab in 2019 with a stubborn premise: fault-tolerant quantum computing is too important to become a private moat. She leads the lab's work on error-corrected architectures and the simulation of materials that matter for the energy transition.

She grew up between Enugu and Winnipeg, the daughter of a pharmacologist and a secondary-school physics teacher. A summer spent repairing spectrophotometers convinced her that the most interesting physics happens when theory has to survive contact with a cold, noisy machine. She has spent two decades building superconducting processors, control electronics, and the unglamorous calibration software that makes them work.

At Ruqi she is responsible for research direction, scientific integrity, and the lab's public-benefit test: every program must name who benefits, how the results will be published, and what happens if the technology succeeds. She still takes a shift on the dilution refrigerator every month.