[00:00:00] Veronica: Hello, and welcome to the quantum spin by HKA. I’m Veronica Combs. I’m a writer and an editor here at the agency. I get to talk every day with really smart people working on really fascinating subjects, everything in the Quantum industry, from hardware to software. On our podcast, we focus in on quantum communication, and by that I don’t mean making networks safe from hacking or entangling photons over long distance, but talking about the technology.

[00:00:26] How do you explain these complicated concepts to people who don’t have a background in science and engineering but want to understand all the same?

[00:00:36] We’ve talked to all kinds of folks this season consultants, scientists, and today I’m very excited to be talking to someone in the arts. Nancy Kawalek is a professor and Distinguished Fellow in the Arts, Science, and Technology at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

[00:00:53] Veronica: Thank you so much for talking with us today, Nancy.

[00:00:55] Nancy: Thanks for inviting me.

[00:00:57] Veronica: So my colleague, Hillary Kay met you and Chicago during a quantum Congress, I believe. And she was so enthralled by your, your work and your professional history that she wanted us to have a conversation. So how did you get to the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering?

[00:01:15] Nancy: Well, I was at University of California, Santa Barbara before that, and I was working in this same area, the intersection of arts and science, and it’s very much about integrating the two, not having one be at the service of the other. That’s really the focus of our research and. The University of Chicago had an amazing, amazing president at the time Robert Zinner, who was very forward thinking.

[00:01:41] He knew that if University of Chicago didn’t create a school of engineering, that it would be a hindrance to their remaining competitive. He also understood that the University of Chicago, probably in this school of engineering wouldn’t really be competitive with schools that have had engineering for 50 or 100 years.

[00:02:00] So, the approach to the school of engineering was very different. It was more about themes and about making themes that were about the people who were hired, first people who were hired, it was then an institute. It’s now the Priztker school. And so the director knew my work from the University of California and so would I like to come to Chicago. That was a little bit difficult because California is very lovely. Especially on a day like today when it’s 8 degrees. But it was really an offer I couldn’t refuse, and so I ended up in Chicago.

[00:02:36] Veronica: And you started your career as an actor, as a theater performer, is that right?

[00:02:40] Nancy: So I was a professional actor in New York City and regional theater, and then I also moved into writing and directing, and I’ve always been really interested in science and like them both a lot. I became pretty surprised that there weren’t more stories about science. I know a lot of scientists, and I hear these amazing things out of science, and I’m thinking, why, why don’t we see this on stage more?

[00:03:08] It’s so thrilling. And I was also in New York at a time, I think it’s also now true, it’s probably always true for theater, that it was very hard for theaters to take risks. I just started to think, well, what if we put the two together?

[00:03:22] And I was talking to a scientist who was telling me that things that I wasn’t aware of, such as the fact that many of the great Nobel prizes and discoveries come about purely by accident, and that failure is an inherent part of the scientific process, and it’s just shocked me because we’d like to think we’re so free in the arts, but honestly, in the professional arts world, failure is not really an option.

[00:03:51] And again, there are a lot of reasons for that, but really in some ways make sense. I wish it were different, but that’s the way it is, especially in the US. And so I began to think, well, what if we put that model with the arts? What if we could take risks in the arts and could embrace failure as a way of having new breakthroughs in the arts?

[00:04:09] So that was one impetus and again, this idea of why aren’t all these amazing stories from science being heard and told and there’s so much amazing stuff. And yet, as the public becomes more mistrustful of science and more skeptical about it, all of this kind of came together at the same time. And that was really the impetus behind the work that we started.

[00:04:31] Veronica: And at UC Santa Barbara, you started STAGE,

[00:04:34] Nancy: right? So STAGE stands for Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration. And we started very small. Basically, we started as an international script competition for the best new play about science and technology, and we felt we had to build a profile in order to be taken seriously, which I think seems very legitimate.

[00:04:58] And we, it was basically myself and a part time assistant and we started this script competition and the plays that won did very, very well. It was very fortunate. We also worked very hard to get some very high profile judges. We had Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winning and Tony Award winning judges who were kind enough to help us judge these scripts and the plays went on to success and that really launched STAGE. And we knew that we wanted to create our own work and do our own research in this arts and science territory, so this permitted us to take that leap to the next level.

[00:05:40] Veronica: And so then you moved the organization from, like you said, the beaches of California to the cold shores of Lake Michigan. I’m in the Midwest, so I’m glad to see things happening in the Midwest. I’m in Louisville, Kentucky.

[00:05:52] Nancy: Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:53] No, all these incredibly exciting, especially in the quantum space right now, especially, there are amazing things happening in the Midwest. Much as I love California, I think I maybe made it to the beach five times the entire time I was there. But I do love the theater scene in Chicago. It’s such a stimulating place to be and it has this reputation for being a little quirky and I think that’s just right for what we do.

[00:06:21] Veronica: So you, I think that you said you started with the script competition, but now you’re making games and movies and, you know, STAGE has evolved. Tell us about that.

[00:06:30] Nancy: So we started with theater projects because that was what I knew. And then we had an amazing postdoctoral scholar come work with us, a PhD from Northwestern in electrical engineering and physics.

[00:06:45] Her name is Dr. Sunanda Prabhu-Gaunkar and Sunanda joined us as a postdoc, as I said, and as a postdoc project, she started to make films about scientists and they were just so wonderful. She was just so amazing that she became a permanent member of the team, and she’s now our Director of Science. And I just can’t say enough great things about her and her work, and the series that she has started is called Curiosity, The Making of a Scientist.

[00:07:15] And each episode focuses on an individual scientist. And really is trying to make science relatable, demystify scientists, talk about what inspires them, what makes them curious, really the nature of curiosity itself. And our first episode is about a graduate student who came from a very challenging background.

[00:07:37]  He was in the seventh year of his PhD in quantum science. And he couldn’t get his device to work, and of course he had to graduate. He did very well, he’s now at IBM. That was our very first, or Sunandra’s very first episode, and it focused on quantum science, so that was wonderful.

[00:07:58] Veronica: That’s one of the tensions, I think, in the quantum industry, that it’s not 100 percent in the lab, but there’s definitely some experimenting going on and you have to have a little bit of tolerance for, you know, Not failure or setbacks, or, oh, it didn’t work out the way we wanted. That’s what kind of drew me to the field. Just because of that idea of exploration.

[00:08:16] Sounds like that exploration is an important part of your work.

[00:08:19] Nancy: Very much so. And I think those are two of the most exciting things about quantum. So first, that there are aspects of it that people don’t really completely understand such as measurement.

[00:08:33] What is, what exactly is going on? I mean, I think it’s understood mathematically, but the real, and this is a layperson’s interpretation, the real mechanism behind it, and yet the fact that there’s so much that people can still do with it. To me, that’s fascinating. That’s one thing. The second thing, and I suppose this is true of a lot of scientific discoveries.

[00:08:55] I’m sure it was true of the transistor when it came out that people didn’t really know what the possibilities were, but the fact that you don’t really know so many things that will result from quantum. And that to me is thrilling just to think about those possibilities.

[00:09:11] So I really, I love the idea of that very explorational approach to the whole field. I find that very exciting.

[00:09:20] Veronica: Yes, it is exciting and communicating it is obviously our specialty here at HKA. And I was reading through the STAGE’s, webpage and looking at your different productions. And I think the quantum theater project is one of your current ones.

[00:09:35] And it’s about a woman and her identities, and I thought, Yeah. Oh, that superposition. I mean, all the last three years, I’ve done nothing but quantum, and it just hit me in that description of your work.

[00:09:46] Nancy: So that is very much about superposition, and that plays an important role, actually superposition measurement entanglement.

[00:09:54] And that theater project is sort of, I have to laugh every time I think about it, because here you’re taking a subject like quantum science, it defies narrative. And here we are, our whole MO is, we’re very content driven. It’s always about making a story about the science because we’re really trying to reach non-scientists and get the public excited.

[00:10:17] And one way to do that is always, I think, through emotional engagement. That’s really our whole MO at STAGE. Many arts and science entities, institutions and labs are very technology focused, which is terrific. And of course, we’re also technology focused, but more than that, we’re content driven. It’s really about the story.

[00:10:40] It’s really about giving someone an experience attached to science that moves them or makes them laugh. It gives them a fun experience and that’s what people remember. That’s what gets people excited. If you ask anybody, how did you get interested in X? They usually will tell you it has, it has some memory for them, some emotional hook.

[00:11:03] And so that’s what we do. So that’s very important. And so we tried to tell a story about quantum. And as I said, here, you’ve got the subject that defies narrative. It’s been real. It’s taken us a very long time. It’s been very, very challenging, exciting, challenging.

[00:11:17] And a lot of times I just laugh and I think, what are we thinking? We must be insane. Why are we doing this? Why are we driving ourselves nuts? But I think it’s been worth it. We finished the script. We’re refining aspects of it now. And we hope to have a reading of it this winter. Wow. It’s coming in the 1st quarter of the new year.

[00:11:38] Veronica: It’s so interesting that a theater group has a director of science. What is Sunanda’s role? Does she pick subjects , or is she like a copy editor who makes sure the science is described accurately?

[00:11:49] Nancy: She’s really a collaborator, I would call her, because first of all, I’m not a scientist. I will never pretend to be as much as I enjoy science. And so if I, if you really want to be genuine about integrating the two disciplines, you have to have people working in the room together at the same time.

[00:12:07] And that’s very much at the foundation of STAGE too. Artists and scientists have to be working together because it’s another, I would say, goal of STAGE. It’s really part of our mission is that you have artists and scientists in the room at the same time collaborating together because they learn a lot from each other.

[00:12:25] I learned a lot from what I know of the scientific process and just been influenced by it a great deal. Again, this aspect of embracing failure, of iteration, and we don’t often have the luxury of that in all fields, but it’s very important that we work together if we are really going to integrate these 2 disciplines.

[00:12:47] And so Sunanda has been really an essential collaborator in that regard,

[00:12:52] Veronica: I don’t know if it’s urban legend at this point, but I remember reading that Steve jobs when he was designing the Pixar studio put, like, the bathrooms and the lunch rooms in a central place. So, everybody had to cross paths there, and I always thought that was so smart, because it is where that intersection of an engineer and an artist or a singer and a writer whenever they cross paths, it really does result in unexpected exchanges or creations.

[00:13:20] Nancy: It’s really because of the people who come to collaborate with us, be these students or professionals, I do think that the things that they come up with in the space as a result of working together and being able to take this time and iterate and improvise.

[00:13:35] I do think that what results is very imaginative Especially when the students are working students from different disciplines and we get students at all levels from all across the campus They really start to think in new ways and to work in new ways and that’s very essential to what we do

[00:13:54] Veronica: So, how do you find Actors? Are they scientists? Are they theater majors? Are they all of the above?

[00:14:01] Nancy: Both. And we have projects that we work on with students. We have projects that we’ve worked on with professional actors. They’re often people I’ve worked with previously just because I know them to be very flexible and fun to work with and very talented.

[00:14:17] So, sometimes we work with professionals and sometimes we work with a combination of both, which is also a really valuable experience for the students, especially. And It is very interesting to me that it’s not a problem ever getting the scientists on board except for their time, but still, I do think that a lot of scientists are attracted to the idea of having not only a way to express themselves creatively, but also to learn how to explain their work to the public in a unique way. And I think some of the, especially the experienced, scientists know that they’re not often great at doing that, but they know how important it is.

[00:14:57] Artists often will say, Oh, but I, I failed high school science. I’m not smart enough. They always come out excited. That’s the thing that I love. Often I’ll talk with them at some later date and they’ll say, I’m reading this book.

[00:15:17] And I just love that. I love that they realize that you don’t have to be a genius or some special person that science really is for everybody. Unfortunately, it gets a bad rap. And I guess sometimes the arts get a bad rap too, but I like the fact that people have the opportunity to feel that they really can understand it or do it.

[00:15:40] Veronica: So I was also reading about another production that you are working on or maybe it’s, it’s finished. You were inspired by a kung fu exhibit at a museum.

[00:15:49] Nancy: Yes, so that’s how the quantum theater project started. There was something about a kung fu exhibit that dealt with trying to bring back a revered kung fu masters technique that had a lot to do with aspects of time that felt that they had a parallel with quantum mechanics and so we thought originally we were going to do a play about kung fu and quantum. The University of Chicago has a global center in Hong Kong, and we went and did a workshop in Hong Kong. We thought that we would try to develop this theme, but that was one thing that I guess that might be one of our failures that we learned a lot from, but it just became too mystical.

[00:16:40] And that was one thing I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want, even though quantum science has a tremendous amount of wonder and maybe even a sense. I know the scientists will kill me for this, but even a sense of magic about it. I didn’t want that to be the takeaway. We always, while we want to tell a story about science, we always wanted to be accurate.

[00:17:04] And I felt it was getting too mystical and too much in that realm that would diminish the science. And so we ultimately abandoned that,

[00:17:14] Veronica: Well I mean, you have to use your imagination a little bit with quantum, right?

[00:17:17] Nancy: Absolutely. And imagination is part of all science, which I think a lot of people, I’m not sure I even knew that before I really started doing what I’m doing now. But the thing about our current quantum theater project, and that’s just a working title. But because it’s so difficult to tell a story about quantum, most of the ideas about quantum come through in dream sequences or these absurdist sequences.

[00:17:42] And that was the way that we felt we could do justice to quantum, where things happen that we don’t observe in our everyday life, but really tell it in an imaginative way.

[00:17:52] Veronica: Wow. So interesting. I was reading about your work and I understand improvisation is important.

[00:17:58] Nancy: There are certain theater companies, some very well established companies that do work with improvisation as a basis for creating work, and that’s usually referred to as the devised performance. And I think something about that seems to lend itself to the experimental nature of science.

[00:18:17] And we sort of treat each improvisation we do like a little mini experiment. So just as a scientist might run an experiment and then they analyze the data and use that feedback to maybe make an adjustment and then they run it again and again, and that keeps happening each time.

[00:18:36] We do the same with an improvisation. So we do an improvisation and then we see what we’ve learned from that. We take that feedback and adjust the scenario. And do it again, and we keep doing that as well. And so, in that way, we’ve really taken aspects of the scientific process and put them into our process.

[00:18:54] So that was one big reason behind improvisation as a basis for our theater work. The other reason was that at about the same time as what we were talking about earlier, sort of having this conversation with the scientist and learning about the importance of failure. I saw this amazing production by a Quebecois artist named Robert Lepage and it was called “The far side of the moon,” and it was really absolutely amazing. It was about the space race between Russia and the U. S. And that theme was paralleled with the theme of sibling rivalry. So you had international rivalry and sibling rivalry. And technology was used in the staging of this piece in the most imaginative way. And the combination of blending the technology. And the play itself, the dialogue, the acting, so seamlessly was very, very influential.

[00:19:47] It really started me thinking about new, as I was thinking about new subjects for theater, like science, I started thinking about new ways of doing theater. And I do think that’s something we have to investigate by the way in order to keep it contemporary.

[00:20:02] Veronica: So we were talking with a client recently about a Discord channel. So a discord is like a, I always associate with online gaming, but it is a way to build a community and communicate in a real specific medium or format or place. I think of online things as places, whether they are not that’s the way I think of them. So I wondered if you have, as a creative person, have thought about staging a production in an online format.

[00:20:31] Nancy: Yes, we think about this all the time. I do think, and I think the pandemic was very instructive in this regard, because obviously people couldn’t go to the theater.

[00:20:42] And I know a lot of really talented people, and they were just waiting to get back to work. And I thought, you know, we really have to do something different. First of all, I think it’s really important, and part of this is because I’m also have the privilege of being around really young people all the time, and the smartphone changed our lives because now we have agency. We are always the ones who determine what we see, right? We, oh, that’s boring. So we swipe. Now the public wants to be involved in what they’re seeing. They’re no longer willing to be a passive viewer. So we can moan about that. But that’s the way it is.

[00:21:24] And I think it’s up to us, to those of us who love theater and who want to see it succeed, I think we need to think about that in doing theater. Now, I don’t have the answer. I wish I did, but it’s something that I’m very interested in exploring.

[00:21:40] Now, I have attended some I would say more experimental, say, immersive theater shows. I have. I actually did see a play that was done on Twitch and online, and I didn’t love it, but I appreciated that people were trying to do something new.

[00:21:58] And when you’re trying to do something new, it doesn’t always succeed the first time. So I guess what I’m interested in doing, and again, maybe this is as pie in the sky as trying to do a play about quantum, but I think if you could blend these new ways of doing live performance with a really good story. Then I think it would succeed, but how do you do that?

[00:22:22] Veronica: Yes. So speaking of storytelling and technology, I was listening to hard fork, which is a tech podcast from the New York Times recently. And they were talking about AI and I have to say they’re pretty pro AI. They’ve really never met a piece of technology they didn’t like on that podcast, but they were talking about some of the drawbacks, some of the potentially bad uses of AI.

[00:22:45] And one of the hosts said, you know, Hollywood stories are how we understand complex things and how these things get into the mainstream conversation. You know, everyone knows what the Terminator is and Skynet and all of that stuff. So, his suggestion was a movie about the dystopia that an AI algorithm could create if we let it make all our decisions.

[00:23:06] So I just. Again, as an artistic person, I wanted to see what you thought about technology and storytelling.

[00:23:12] Nancy: Well, first of all, I think that that sounds like a really interesting idea. And I do remember, I don’t know if you ever saw this movie, Her. I thought that was a really wonderful depiction of modern technology and with a very good story.

[00:23:27] I guess what I would say is I think progress always wins out. So I think we have to embrace it.

[00:23:33] People say, oh, science is evil. Technology is evil. I don’t think they’re evil inherently. I think what people do with it can be. So, I think we should embrace it and find really positive ways to use it and try to be, to the extent that it’s possible, more aware in advance of what the negative ramifications could be.

[00:23:56] One thing I appreciate about quantum is that people are trying to discuss ethics, the ethics behind quantum. Now, that’s really challenging to do. How do you figure out the ethics of something when you don’t even know what’s possible with it yet? But to just ignore that would be foolish. We should be trying to foresee what some of the negative ramifications could be.

[00:24:18] I’m not a scientist. I can’t verify this for my own lab results, but I have heard that sometimes AI can read certain films, certain x rays or certain or mammograms, for example, with greater accuracy, perhaps than the human eye. Sorry to all the wonderful radiologists out there, but, and I don’t know if that’s a verified fact.

[00:24:43] Let me be clear, but I assume at some point things like that will be very positive uses of AI. So, we have to explore that and embrace that because we can’t stop it. It’s here and we can’t stop it. But maybe we can stop some of the very harmful things from occurring and I think that’s what we should be on the alert for.

[00:25:03] Veronica: Yes, and just being able to ask questions, right? Just because you ask a question about the drawbacks doesn’t mean that you won’t go ahead. You’ll just be a little more aware of all the different things that could happen.

[00:25:15] 2025 is the international year of quantum. I know that one of your other projects is The Quantum Games, which is a board game. I thought that a really good way to celebrate the international year of quantum is to play that game. So tell me about that.

[00:25:29] Nancy: So we actually have a quantum casino. And we have several games. We have board games, we have card games, we have digital games, and we even have a quantum photo booth. And in the quantum photo booth it’s done in pairs, and people each go into a little cubicle and they send each other photos of themselves, encrypted photos, and that teaches people about secure communication through quantum technology, what’s called quantum key distribution.

[00:25:57] The idea behind these games is to have the principles of quantum science built into the mechanics of the game playing. So the games stand on their own as fun games, but by the end of the game you can all say, And you just learned this, this and this about quantum science. And I have to say again, with all due modesty, games have been more successful than I’d ever imagined.

[00:26:22] But from what I understand, games are actually more popular than film these days, I heard. Games are wildly popular and they have been very successful. We’ve actually been to several countries, but then we just got back from Paris with the games that were the Casino Quantique.

[00:26:39] We’ve been to Switzerland, Japan and we’ve done the games in Las Vegas in Chicago. And it looks like we’ll be taking them to the American Physical Society Quantum Summit that’s in Anaheim this year in March. We thought that they would be good for maybe college age people, but the games have been now developed to different levels, and we’ve had children as young as 10 or 12 play some of the games, and then we’ve taken them to these science conferences, and the established scientists have really liked the game, so and that was kind of an accidental discovery, very serendipitous, like science.

[00:27:15] And it’s been tremendous fun. They’ve really appealed to the public and people get excited when they go, “Oh, I get it.” And what’s nice is, again, it’s putting a very positive spin on science. And I really love that. And by the way, spin was not an intended pun, you know, we’ll take it.

[00:27:32] Veronica: So, I think that one of your films is online, “Curiosity”, is that on YouTube or on the University of Chicago website somewhere?

[00:27:41] Nancy: You know, I do think it’s available through our website. I believe the 1st episode, which is called “Superposition” is available online and the 2nd episode, which is called “Serendipity” is also I, if it’s not available now, will be soon.

[00:27:59] And our third episode I should mention, that one is really, I think I’m very excited about that one. That’ll come out later this year. It’s about Walter Massey. And Walter is just a tremendous figure in maybe the world at large. He’s been the president of Morehouse College.

[00:28:14] He’s been the head of the National Science Foundation. He’s now chair of the Giant Magellan Telescope Project. He was the president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which was a brilliant move, having a scientist as the head of an art institute.

[00:28:30] He’s just done so many amazing things, and he’s an amazing human being. And I’m very excited for that film to come out.

[00:28:37] Veronica: That does sound amazing. I will watch for that too. So thank you so much for your time and conversation. It’s been wonderful to hear about your work in Chicago.

[00:28:45] Thanks so much for joining us today.

[00:28:46] Nancy: Thank you very much. I really appreciate your interest in our work. And thanks for having me.

[00:28:51] Veronica Combs: Thanks for joining us for another episode of the quantum spin by HKA. You can find all episodes on our website, hkamarcom. com. Of course, you can find us in all your favorite podcast platforms as well. Follow us on LinkedIn under HKA Marketing Communications if you have an idea for a guest, or if you’d like to be on the podcast yourself, you can reach me on LinkedIn, Veronica Combs, or you can go to our website and share your suggestion via the contact us page. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.