Elica Kyoseva: Role models, mentors and impostor syndrome

My talk with Elica Kyoseva is more than two weeks overdue. First, her young daughter tested positive for Covid. In an interesting one-man theatre piece in which I direct and star and call simply, ‘Hubris: Laughing in the Faces of the Gods’ and perform exclusively via e-mail, I suggest moving the interview back a week. It’s just a week. I mean, I don’t have a five year old and there exists no proof that I ever was one. But I can imagine life with a five-year-old. How do you even know if a five-year-old is sick? Running despite an absence of predators, climbing and staking claims on trees, painting murals on dining room walls with the condiments…

The point is: five-year-olds are busy people. The chances of Elica seeing her daughter in the next seven days - let alone breathing the same air - are, I decide, vanishingly small. We set the interview for a week’s time.

Elica immediately catches Covid and once again we reschedule. When we do finally sit down to talk via Zoom, all prior tribulations are forgotten. Elica arrives at 4pm precisely (though a Bulgarian living in Israel, the pharmaceutical company Boehringer-Ingelheim at which she heads the quantum team is German - she jokingly suggests that the stereotype of teutonic punctuality may be rubbing off on her). She is, on top of her professional accomplishments, enthusiastic in a way that enthuses others, quick to laugh, and in possession of an instantly endearing modesty about her own achievements.

Take Boehringer Ingelheim’s quantum team. Many teams and companies were forced by Covid to make radical adjustments, and many collapsed under the strain. Elica’s team was founded during the pandemic. There was no office: the team of five were recruited and worked from around the world. When the team met face-to-face, they had already been working together for over a year.

“That made our team unique,” says Elica. “We were set up during the pandemic; so travelling couldn’t be an obstacle; wherever people are located, it didn’t matter: we would make it work. That way, we made sure the main criteria for hiring people was really just the knowledge and the quality and experience. Everyone is fully remote like me. It’s totally manageable.”

If anyone ever asks you, as a quantum computing professional, where you see the likely early use cases of quantum computing providing a benefit that outclasses classical computing, say polar bears and refuse to take further questions. We are all familiar with the answers to that question: finance, materials engineering and, of course in the case of Boehringer Ingelheim, drug design. Elica had been following a standard academic career path: from undergrad degree in physics at the University of Sofia, to a postdoc in Singapore to an assistant professorship. Then two things changed: more and more venture capitalists began to crop up asking, ‘quantum?’ like the seagulls in Finding Nemo, and Elica had her own idea for a quantum start-up. Then a third thing happened, that thing was Covid, and as ably demonstrated above, Covid is just loves to hear about your exciting plans and then look sad and shake it’s head and explain why it’s better you two stay at home together instead.

Elica worked for a while advising the flocks of quantum investors, who mostly, she says, had “no idea on how to vet the start-ups that cae to pitch them.” Shortly after, she was hired by Boehringer Ingelheim, the world’s largest private pharmaceutical company.

This is the first, but not the last, time in the interview where Elica skips over a personal achievement you would hope to remember: in 2016, while working in Singapore, Elica received an award from the President of Bulgaria.

“It's a great recognition,” Elica says, with British levels of self-effacement. “Because it's the award for Bulgarians who work worldwide across information technology. Sometimes it’s someone from quantum computing, but usually not. So that was… pretty amazing.”

When I ask about the award, or the recognition she has received over the years for mentoring women in STEM fields, there’s a visible and audible change in Kyoseva - while gracious, this is not what she is here to talk about. We change tack to something less vainglorious. After the digital niceties, the first line of the first e-mail I ever saw from Kyoseva mentioned how excited she was to talk about diversity in quantum. I ask her about the perception and stigma of computing as - my words - a ‘boy’s club’. My interviewees over the past three years have been, no question, overwhelmingly male. Is that representative of what she’s seen, and is the disparity worse than in classical computing?

“I would say yes,” she says. “And for the moment at least, there is still not a lot of gender diversity. I would say we are years, maybe even a decade behind [where we are with] classical information and computer science, in terms of equal representation.

Addressing this gender imbalance is woven into Elica’s life’s work. When she was in Singapore, she operated partly under the title of ‘STEM Ambassador to the UN Women Singapore Committee’.

“The most important thing is to have role models; to really see that there are women being recognised for technical skills or in leadership positions, and that women who achieve are seen to climb up the ladder and are included as equals. It can be difficult for a woman to have her voice heard. Then there is impostor syndrome, which I think everyone feels. I still do, despite my experience and everything.

” No-one that I remember interviewing in quantum computing has ever brought up impostor syndrome, or any psychological strains the sector places upon those working in it. But impostor syndrome - or the feeling that, wherever you are in a career or similar role, you don’t deserve to be there and are forever on the verge of being ‘outed’ as a charlatan or a chancer - makes specific sense in the world of quantum computing, Elica postulates.

“It is normal,” she says. “Because you really do work with some of the smartest in the world. There [really] is always someone smarter in the room. It’s very humbling. But that does not make you an impostor.”