Kristel Michielsen, a computational physicist, received her PhD from the University of Groningen in 1993. Since 2009 she leads the research group Quantum Information Processing (QIP) at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and is Professor QIP at RWTH Aachen University. Kristel Michielsen and her research group have ample experience in performing large-scale simulations of quantum computers and annealers and in benchmarking and studying prototype applications for this new compute technology. Together with Prof. Lippert she is building up the quantum computer user facility JUNIQ at the JSC.