Sean Sullivan pursued his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Materials Engineering at Purdue University (in 2012 and 2013, respectively). During a stint working at Toyota R&D, he gained an appreciation for the role cutting-edge materials physics could play in sustainable energy. He then joined the Quantum Materials for Sustainable Technologies group at UT Austin, where he performed his doctoral research on quantum transport in materials for applications in energy conversion and quantum information.

As a postdoctoral appointee at Argonne, his research focused on new materials and devices for quantum technologies, and he built out Chicago’s metropolitan-scale quantum communication testbed.