Dr. Bryan Gard (GTRI) is a Senior Research Scientist in the Quantum Systems Division at GTRI. He received his PhD in the group of Jonathan Dowling at Louisiana State University. His graduate research focused on exotic states of light and their use in Optical Metrology. Before coming to GTRI, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech where his research expanded to development of quantum computing algorithms. Since at GTRI, he has developed a custom benchmark algorithm for quantum devices and contributed to the ONISQ/OPTIQ project, which uses the QAOA algorithm for potential quantum advantage. He has experience running quantum algorithms on current cloud-based quantum computers (IBM, IonQ, Rigetti, DWAVE, Xanadu, and Quantinuum) and local GTRI ion-trap devices.