€4.6 Million European Network Trains 15 Quantum Error Correction PhDs
The French company Alice & Bob is joining QuBriC, a European doctoral network set up to train researchers in quantum error correction, and will contribute its work on cat-qubit error correction. The network runs on €4.6 million from Horizon Europe’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program over 48 months, and plans to recruit and train 15 doctoral researchers across 16 universities and seven quantum companies.
Error correction is one of the harder problems standing between today’s noisy quantum machines and ones that can run useful calculations, which is why a program built solely around training in it is worth noting.
What QuBriC Is and How It Works
Specifically, QuBriC is a doctoral network, not a lab or a machine. Its members include ETH Zürich, TU Delft, UCL, INRIA, and the companies Riverlane and IQM, alongside Alice & Bob. The MSCA model works differently from a standard research grant. Instead of funding one institution, it pays for a consortium to jointly recruit, supervise, and train PhD candidates, who move between academic and industry settings during their studies.
According to the August 12 press release, the 15 researchers will work across quantum information theory, coding theory, algorithms, and hardware engineering. QuBriC’s organizers say expertise in these areas tends to sit in separate camps, with people trained in either classical coding theory or quantum physics but rarely both. The training model is their attempt to produce researchers comfortable across the full error correction stack. That’s the stated rationale, not a claim that current researchers can’t collaborate.
Quantum error correction is important because quantum states are delicate. Measuring a qubit directly destroys the information it holds, so a working fault-tolerant system needs ways to spot and fix errors without reading the encoded state outright. Researchers widely treat this as necessary for scaling quantum computers to a useful size. It remains an open engineering and theoretical problem, and QuBriC does not change that.
Where Alice & Bob Fits
Indeed, Alice & Bob’s role is one contribution among many. As an industry partner, the company says it will help shape the network’s research and training agenda and bring its knowledge of cat-qubit-based error correction. Cat qubits are an approach designed to suppress certain kinds of errors at the hardware level. They don’t remove the need for error correction, and no single qubit architecture has proven itself best.
Additionally, Alice & Bob describes itself as a leader in fault-tolerant quantum computing. It says QuBriC gives it access to specialized talent and academic partners working on the same problem. Recruitment for the 15 doctoral positions is the network’s first concrete task.