“I found my happy workplace”: How an APS annual meeting spurred a career at a quantum startup

Low-temperature physicist Elina Potanina is excited for this year’s Global Physics Summit in Denver, Colorado. “It’s just a crazy week and you probably need an extra week afterwards just to rest, but it’s so worth it,” she says.

Potanina, a sales engineer at Maybell Quantum, will travel from Finland to join many of her colleagues from across the United States and Europe in person. As a sales engineer, she sits “on the border between business, engineering, and R&D,” she says, helping her company meet the needs of a rapidly evolving market and customers.

In 2020, Potanina, who had recently graduated with her doctorate from Aalto University in Finland, had just started her first position in industry. She was working for Bluefors, a developer of dilution refrigerators. They’re “a special kind of fridge that reaches very, very low temperatures, where we can see exotic phenomena — where, for example, superconducting qubits perform well,” she says.

That year, when the March Meeting rolled around, many of Potanina’s colleagues were scheduled to attend. But the COVID-19 pandemic ramped up just as the meeting was scheduled to kick-off. Given the public health threat, the in-person meeting was cancelled.

The next year, in 2021, Potanina — more settled in her role at Bluefors — attended her first March Meeting, which was entirely remote. Her presentation went well, but it left her excited for a traditional in-person experience.

She finally got her chance at the March Meeting in 2022 in Chicago. “Everybody was so happy to meet and talk in person again,” she recalls.

In those two years, however, her company had grown so fast — from roughly 200 employees to nearly 700 — that she was questioning her fit. “It’s just normal,” she says. “People outgrow jobs and teams. Structures change, people change, and leadership changes.”

Preparing for March Meeting 2023, Potanina was thinking about her future, and had her eye on a newcomer in the field of dilution refrigerators: Maybell Quantum. Navigating the meeting’s expansive exhibitor hall in Las Vegas, “I approached the team,” she says. “They seemed like an interesting new player and they had cool merch.” She remembers swapping themed candy from her own company’s booth for casino-themed playing cards and gummy bears.

“There are always people who are afraid to come to the booth and ask for career advice or if we’re hiring, but I think more people should do that,” she says. “It’s nice to have an honest conversation with a student, because we were all students once.”

Potanina’s discussion with the Maybell Quantum staff at their March Meeting booth that day kicked off a conversation about future job opportunities. After a year, she joined them as a remote employee.

“Since then, we’ve established a new entity in Finland … and now we have an office, employees,” she says. “It’s been a really fast-paced and exciting journey. I found my happy workplace.”

Each year, Potanina looks forward to connecting with her colleagues from the U.S. and Europe at the March Meeting. Beginning last year, APS swapped its long-running March and April Meetings with a combined Global Physics Summit, uniting the branches of physics in one place for the world’s largest gathering of physicists.

This year’s Global Physics Summit will take place in a location that’s special to Potanina: Denver, Colorado. ​​Because the city is home to Maybell Quantum’s headquarters, she’ll also have a chance to meet customers and new colleagues in the company’s production facility.

With an anticipated attendance of 14,000, Potanina is especially excited to work her company’s booth in the exhibitor hall — and the chance to talk with early-career physicists about the opportunities in low-temperature physics and the quantum industry.

“If you want to get into the field of quantum computing, you’re not too late,” she says. “The field is still growing like crazy.”

Learn more about this year’s Global Physics Summit in Denver, Colorado.