FAU Lands Federal Grant as South Florida Builds Its Quantum Workforce

The $200,000 cybersecurity award follows a separate $20 million agreement to bring a D-Wave quantum computer to Boca Raton.

Florida Atlantic University has secured $200,000 in federal funding to train a quantum cybersecurity workforce, adding an education initiative to its larger investment in advanced computing in Boca Raton.

The university announced the award on Oct. 6. Funding comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and will support a regional program covering Palm Beach and Broward counties, along with Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties on the Treasure Coast.

FAU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science will lead the effort with D-Wave Quantum, InfraGard South Florida Members Alliance and local education partners. The work will combine practical training with curriculum development, preparing students and working professionals for security challenges involving quantum computing and power infrastructure.

Partners include the Palm Beach County and Broward County public school systems, bringing the initiative into classrooms before students reach college. Yufei Tang, an FAU associate professor who directs the FPL Center for Intelligent Energy Technologies, will lead the project.

The federal award follows a much larger commitment announced in January: FAU’s $20 million agreement to purchase and install a D-Wave Advantage2 annealing quantum computer at its Boca Raton campus. D-Wave said at the time that deployment was expected later in 2026. The computer purchase and the new workforce award are separate investments.

FAU says the installation will make it Florida’s first university to publicly host a dedicated annealing quantum computer with more than 4,400 qubits. The university continues to describe the installation as forthcoming.

The broader D-Wave collaboration also contemplated a Quantum Applications Academy at FAU, alongside research and workforce training. Florida and Boca Raton were providing job growth and training incentives in parallel, according to the company’s January announcement. Together, those commitments suggest a regional strategy to develop the technical workforce alongside the computing infrastructure.

The cybersecurity work comes as businesses face a lengthy transition in how they protect sensitive information. NIST finalized its first three post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024 and urged system administrators to begin adopting them. The standards are designed to withstand attacks by future quantum computers capable of defeating widely used encryption.

That transition has practical implications well beyond quantum research, touching the systems that protect medical records, online transactions and confidential communications. NIST has stressed that integrating the new protections will take time.

FAU was one of nine organizations selected for the latest round of NIST’s RAMPS workforce program, which awarded more than $1.7 million across eight states. The agency announced the recipients on Sept. 18. Its approach ties training to the hiring needs of local businesses and nonprofits.

For South Florida employers, the opportunity is a closer connection to people developing these specialized skills. FAU plans to sustain the effort through shared coursework, online training and a regional consortium involving employers, with the aim of continuing the work beyond the initial grant.