With our childcare pilot programme, Quantum Delta NL and Women in Quantum Development aim to reduce some of the most pressing issues that prevent women from engaging in Europe’s fast-growing quantum community.

One of the women that made use of this programme so far, is Subhasree Patro. Subhasree recently defended her PhD thesis and will be starting two postdoctoral positions, both at Utrecht University and at QuSoft. Below Subhasree shares her experience:

“As a single mother of a 5-year-old child, it has not been always possible for me to go to conferences or on research visits especially when the conference is on a different continent. Conferences mostly don't have childcare facilities or funds for childcare. But this time, making use of the childcare programme, I could visit the FSTTCS 2022 conference, in India, in person along with my daughter. I gave two talks, one of which was an invited talk at the FSTTCS fine-grained cryptography workshop and one on a paper that got accepted to this conference.

The experience of giving talks in person is much better when compared to giving a talk online. My talks resulted in several interactions and networking that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn't physically present. Having QDNL and WIQD take care of the travel costs for my daughter really helped me, clearly financially but more importantly by making this conference (almost) equally accessible to me as a mom as compared to any other PhD student. Also, I was able to make a research visit to CQT, NUS in Singapore allowing me to interact with other researchers and present some of my recent results.”

Thanks, Subhasree, for sharing your story! 

Read more on the Childcare Programme here.