Innovators´ Club Quantum Computing – a game-changing technology in its infancy

Biography

Daniel is co-founder and CEO of Kipu Quantum GmbH, a quantum computing startup with the mission to shorten the waiting time for industrial quantum advantage for end users by leveraging application- and hardware-specific algorithms.

Previously he served as a project lead with BASF SE, working on the strategic impact of quantum computing and other corporate-development related topics. Later, as a senior consultant at McKinsey's Frankfurt office, he built up McKinsey's quantum computing capabilities and acted as a consultant for clients in verticals such as chemicals, pharma, oil & gas, banking, automotive, and electronics.

He co-built a specialty chemicals startup as the first non-founder employee (high-tech and electronic chemicals) in his twenties and mastered skills like R&D and managing projects and teams of various sizes along the way. He also tapped into product development and strategic marketing to reach market readiness for deep-blue TADF technology, which is commercialized in OLED displays to drastically decrease the power consumption of hand-held devices and enable better displays.

Daniel holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & the Karlsruhe School of Optics and photonics. He started his professional career as a freelance journalist on the mission to break down science into something readers could enjoy with their morning coffee.

Biography

Dr. Philipp Harbach is the Global Head of Group Digital Innovation in the global Data Office at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, where he and his team are focusing on digital innovation with the help of modern data science, text analytics, and simulation methods.

In his previous role as Head of Digital Chemistry, he explored applications and products of digital technologies specifically for chemistry use cases. Philipp joined Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany in 2014 as a laboratory head and established computational chemistry in the field of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) within the Electronics business.

In 2013, he completed his Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Heidelberg University. In his thesis, he developed and applied efficient theoretical methods for molecular systems in photochemistry. For Quantum Computing, he is specifically interested in the application of quantum methods to industrial problems. He is at the forefront of the first internal and external initiatives to adopt these algorithms at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.