Prof. Dr. Kristel Michielsen received her PhD from the University of Groningen,the Netherlands,  for work on the simulation of strongly correlated electron systems in 1993. Since 2009, she is group leader of the Quantum Information Processing group at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Forschungszentrum Jülich and Professor of Quantum Information Processing at RWTH Aachen University. Kristel Michielsen and her group have ample experience in performing large-scale simulations of quantum systems. With her group and a team of international collaborators, she set the world record in simulating a quantum computer (QC) with 48 qubits. In 2019, she participated in a research collaboration that proved Google’s quantum supremacy. She is building up the Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ) at the JSC. Her research interests range from classical simulations of electrodynamics and quantum mechanics to quantum computing and quantum computing architectures.