Maria Yuffa and Arash Sal Moslehian, two master students in Neuro-X at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), have won the NeuroQuantum Nexus prize in the Connected DMV's Global Industry Challenge.

The Global Industry Challenge is an official program of the United Nations' International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ) with the award ceremony held at the Quantum World Congress 2025. Participants collaborated in teams to develop viable solutions for diverse fields, including life sciences, finance, climate risk, transportation, and logistics.

Yuffa and Sal Moslehian, won in the life science category, for which UMD's Wolfgang Losert, John Sawyer, and Franz Klein (QLab) challenged participants to develop innovative techniques utilizing noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and hybrid quantum-classical approaches to analyze neural network calcium signal datasets.

The winning team applied classical and quantum graph convolutional neural networks to the problem. Moreover, they analyzed two complementary approaches to model neural organization in the auditory cortex: one based on functional connectivity and the other on anatomical proximity—providing insight into how spatial and functional structure jointly contribute to auditory processing.

Big congratulations and thanks for the interesting contributions to all participants!

The picture shows Yuffa, Losert, Sawyer, and Klein at the QLab/QSF booth during the Quantum World Congress 2025.