Developing quantum AI to evolve, predict, and understand disordered systems, to make real, tangible, deployable tools for climate resilience. Disordered systems govern some of the most challenging problems on the planet: everything from climate change acceleration in the atmosphere, down to the thermal behaviour dancing across a GPU chip in a data centre.

Disordered regimes are where classical machine learning breaks down. Chaotic systems drown it in complexity, and small errors compound until forecasts fall apart. Quantum machine learning is constructed from the same physics as the disorder itself: it can represent these tangled, correlated systems natively, holding far more structure in far fewer parameters. The approach pairs quantum models with the best of classical AI; the quantum layer capturing the deep physical structure, the classical layer making it fast and deployable.

Scoping Our Planet asks how we close the measurement and modelling gaps that leave unacceptable uncertainty in our picture of the Earth system. the deepest of those gaps sitting in disordered regimes. This is where extreme events are born and classical models are weakest. During the fellowship I'll be testing whether quantum-native methods materially sharpen forecasts in exactly these regimes.

Jacinta is a quantum computing physicist and co-founder of Percene, where she builds hybrid quantum-classical AI models for tail-risk intelligence in chaotic physical systems. She has seven years of quantum hardware and algorithm experience across five qubit architectures. Jacinta and her co-founder Nicolas De Matteis won the 2025 Quantum Global Industry Challenge at Quantum World Congress. She most recently was a Quantum Research Associate at the University of Oxford, and she writes about quantum computing for a general audience at Quantum May. Outside the lab, Jacinta is a lifelong advocate for climate-vulnerable communities and endangered species, and a firm believer that the quantum physics of the very small is our greatest tool for survival, and to protect this beautiful, disordered planet of ours.