The University of Colorado Boulder was awarded $37.5 million from a federal research agency to propel its quantum research, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced Tuesday.

The school was one of eight academic institutions to receive a total of $290 million as part of the NSF’s “Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes” program designed to help the U.S. accelerate the supercomputer technology.

The program based in CU Boulder — NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Systems through Entangled Science and Engineering (NSF Q-SEnSE) — was founded in 2020 when the federal organization awarded it $20 million to jump-start the program.

Now, it has nearly 40 researchers and connections to 16 institutions, according to CU Boulder. 

The program in Boulder specializes in developing highly accurate atomic clocks, the world’s “most stable laser” and biomedical sensors to quickly detect diseases in human breath. 

Some of the money will go toward funding workforce development and training programs, the university said.

“This funding will accelerate the development of transformative technologies, support the growth of Colorado’s thriving quantum ecosystem and further strengthen Boulder’s position as a global hub for quantum innovation in which CU Boulder continues to play a key role,” Justin Schwartz, CU Boulder chancellor, said in a news release.

Colorado’s quantum ecosystem has been flooded with hundreds of millions of dollars in investments to support the commercialization of the budding sciences.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump had the federal government take $2 billion in equity stakes in quantum companies, including $100 million for Louisville-based Infleqtion. The Biden administration designated the Mountain West a federal quantum tech hub and the ecosystem received more than $100 million in federal and matching state grants, much of which is being used to fund a campus near Boulder to become quantum’s version of the Stanford Research Park in Silicon Valley.

Recently, a few Colorado companies, including some founded on CU Boulder’s science, have gone public on the stock market and have been valued at billions of dollars and cemented themselves as rare unicorn companies.

There are more than 30 quantum companies based in the Front Range, according to CU Boulder.

The other awards went to the University of Maryland, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University and University of California. 

“It’s time for focused activities to leverage that base of knowledge to drive us even farther forward to the benefit of all Americans,” said Brian Stone, NSF’s acting director. “The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes are a next step for us in understanding the quantum world we live in.”