Riccardo Manenti earned his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2017 with a thesis investigating the coupling between a superconducting qubit and a mechanical oscillator based on surface acoustic waves. His research contributed to the formation of a new research field, now called circuit quantum acousto-dynamics. He is currently a Senior Quantum Engineer at Rigetti Computing, a quantum computing company based in Berkeley, California. Mario Motta earned his Ph.D. at the University of Milano in 2015 with a thesis on quantum Monte Carlo simulation of fermionic systems. After postdoctoral positions at the College of William and Mary and the California Institute of Technology, he became a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center in 2019.