Engineering
Mei-Lin Chen
Quantum Control Engineer
she/her · at Ruqi since 2020
“The qubit is the headline. The timing budget is the story. Everything interesting happens in the eighteen nanoseconds before the pulse.”
Mei-Lin designs the real-time control stack that turns a sequence of pulses into a quantum experiment. Her group owns the FPGA firmware, the calibration layer, and the timing budgets that determine whether a two-qubit gate is a gate or an expensive source of heat.
She was born in Taipei and moved to Pittsburgh for graduate school, where she discovered that she liked the oscilloscope more than the seminar. She spent several years in industrial control before deciding that she wanted to build tools that other labs could inspect and modify.
She is the lead maintainer of Kestrel, the lab's open control stack, and a persistent advocate for measuring the machine you actually have rather than the one on the roadmap.
Working on
FPGA control · Calibration · Open instrumentation
Off the clock
Runs ultramarathons, bakes absurdly precise bread, and has a strong opinion about cable management.
Ask me about
FPGAs, timing budgets, open hardware, ultrarunning.
Questions in the drawer
- How low can the control latency go without making the system impossible to debug?
- What calibration metadata does another group need to reproduce a gate fidelity?
- Can a control stack be open source and still be boring enough for production science?
Selected work
2026
2025
2026
2024
Open to collaborations
Work with Mei-Lin
Good questions make better neighbours.
We answer email from students, journalists, public servants, and anyone who is trying to understand what quantum technology can actually do.