Texas Governor Greg Abbott has appointed five prominent leaders from industry, academia, and national security to the newly established Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee. The committee is tasked with developing the state’s strategic blueprint to accelerate its quantum economy, leveraging existing regional strengths in semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and defense. The appointees include:
- Lieutenant General Richard “Ross” Coffman (U.S. Army, Ret.), President of Forward Edge AI.
- Victor Fishman, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Texas Research Alliance.
- Lin Zhou, Ph.D., Vice President, CIO, and Executive Director for AI and Quantum Computing at Texas Tech University.
- John Josephakis, Global Vice President at NVIDIA.
- Jeff Prevost, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Executive Director for the Open Cloud Institute at UT San Antonio.
The full gubernatorial appointment notice is available here.
The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) has named Dr. Philip Makotyn as its new Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Dr. Makotyn brings nearly two decades of deep-tech and quantum ecosystem experience to the 128-acre Chicago development. He joins the IQMP from semiconductor-laser manufacturer Vexlum US, where he served as President. His background also includes leadership positions as the Executive Director of the CUbit Quantum Initiative at CU Boulder, as well as senior roles at Lockheed Martin and Honeywell Quantum Solutions. The official announcement is available here.
Aliro Quantum has appointed telecom and optical networking pioneer Fahri Diner as Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors. Diner’s extensive three-decade career includes founding Qtera, an ultra-long-reach optical transport pioneer acquired by Nortel Networks for $3.25 billion, and Plume, a globally scaled smart-connectivity platform valued at $2.6 billion. At Aliro, Diner will leverage his background in major network infrastructure transitions to guide the commercial scaling of the company’s carrier-class quantum network operating system. The appointment details can be found here.
Zapata Quantum (OTC: ZPTA) has further built out its post-restructuring executive team by appointing co-founder Jhonathan Romero Fontalvo, Ph.D., as Vice President of Product and enterprise software veteran Ian Rotondi-Gray as Senior Director of Partnerships and Go-To-Market Strategy. Dr. Romero Fontalvo, a pioneer of Variational Quantum Algorithms at Harvard, returns to Zapata from Axiomatic AI. Rotondi-Gray joins the company with a deep background in scaling advanced software adoptions from previous enterprise roles at Palantir and Oracle. The full commercial and product announcement is available here.
QuantX Labs has announced a transition in its board leadership, appointing independent non-executive director Kim Scott as the new Chair of the Board. Scott, an experienced defense-industry leader with a five-year tenure on the QuantX board, succeeds outgoing Chair Andrew Fletcher AO, who stepped down after more than seven years of service. Under Fletcher’s guidance, the Adelaide-based precision timing and quantum sensing company successfully delivered its first CRYO technology to defense customers and recently launched its flagship TEMPO optical atomic clock platform into orbit. The complete transition announcement is available here.
We wish all these organizations and individuals success in their new endeavors.
June 6, 2026
