Prof. Mauritz Kop, Principal Investigator, Leads CIGI's Quantum Nexus Workshop on Canadian Strategic Advantage, With Six Emerging Scholars

On Wednesday, October 21, 2026, Prof. Mauritz Kop, Senior Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), leads the workshop of the CIGI project The Quantum Nexus: A Framework for Canadian Strategic Advantage in a Contested Domain. A public online expert panel from 12:00 to 1:00 PM Eastern Time is followed by a closed-door roundtable with senior officials, laboratory leaders, and legal and industry experts from Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Supply Chains, Quantum-AI, Standards, and Allied Strategy

SLAC Director John Sarrao, Dalhousie's Michael Karanicolas, Tina Dekker, Queen's University's Michael P. A. Murphy, and Copenhagen's Timo Minssen each take one front of the quantum competition, with CIGI's Tracey Forrest opening the session. The roundtable includes Dominic Rochon of the Privy Council Office, CIPO's Konstantinos Georgaras, former U.S. export-control chief Kevin J. Wolf, Michele Mosca, and Larry Diamond. The project, funded by the Department of National Defence's MINDS program, aims at strategic advantage for Canada and its allies.

Six Emerging Scholars and the Founding of CIGI

Six emerging scholars, personally selected and mentored by Kop, join the workshop and will contribute to the final CIGI report. Our article also traces Kop's work with Canada, from the Council of Canadian Academies panel chaired by the late Raymond Laflamme to the Nexus paper, and the history of CIGI, founded in 2001 by BlackBerry's Jim Balsillie in Waterloo's Quantum Valley.