Virginia Economic Review

One is a tiny company with its eyes on the heavens: Micro Harmonics pioneered high-tech designs and components with help from NASA.

Mike Coleman is president and CEO of CV International, a Norfolk-based global logistics, freight forwarding, and trade compliance services provider, and Capes Shipping Agencies, a wholly owned subsidiary that provides ship agency, cargo forwarding, and logistics management services to clients.

Lance Harcrow is chief operating officer at Estes Forwarding Worldwide (EFW), a subsidiary of Estes Express Lines and a leading domestic and international freight forwarder headquartered in Chesterfield County.

Dr. Myra Blanco is chief growth officer at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) and CEO of the university’s Dock to Door Coalition, a partnership of nearly 100 organizations across industry, education, and government that works to develop an integrated approach to modern freight transportation by solving critical supply chain issues.

Ashleigh de la Torre is vice president of public policy at Amazon, where she leads the company’s transportation and sustainability initiatives, supporting its operations, logistics, and delivery businesses across land, air, and sea.

Upgrading Interstate Capacity Along Key Arteries The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) is in the midst of a $3.9 billion upgrade to the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, scheduled to be completed in 2027.

Supply chain management (SCM) and logistics have changed dramatically in the last decade. There’s growing demand for deeper visibility into every step of the supply chain. Automation is playing an ever-larger role in the movement of goods.

Supplier and customer accessibility has always played a key role in industrial site selection decisions. But the supply chain shakeups over the last five years have pushed manufacturers to rethink the types of sites that might allow them to best serve their key stakeholders.

Ask a major importer or exporter what constitutes an optimal air cargo partner for their supply chain, and you’ll hear the usual desired qualities: location, transit time, Foreign Trade Zone incentives, carbon footprint, and even weather.

Real estate developers have dealt with a daunting set of complications in the last few years, from increased borrowing costs to inflation to labor issues. It’s no surprise that developers and site selectors have focused on predictability as they consider supply chain factors in site decisions.

Early in the morning of March 27, a container ship about as tall as the Eiffel Tower left the Port of Baltimore going approximately 9 mph. The ship, named the Dali, was fully loaded with cargo and weighed nearly 100,000 tons.

In 1981, computing giant IBM collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Computer Science for a conference, “The Physics of Computation.”

Dr. Sophia Economou is a professor of physics at Virginia Tech and the director of the university’s Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering. Her research focuses on theoretical quantum information science, including quantum computing with numerous types of qubits.

La Vida Cooper is the communications and navigation line of business manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the deputy program manager for strategic initiatives within the exploration and space communications projects division at Goddard, and the executive director of the Washington Metropolitan Quantum Network Research Consortium (DC-QNet), a joint initiative among six federal agencies and two affiliates to operate a quantum network testbed.

The quantum age is rapidly approaching. So rapidly, in fact, that any approach to developing a workforce must account for the changes happening at the speed of light as quantum science shifts from theoretical to practical application.

In the world of financial services, time can represent both money and opportunity lost. The potential time savings from the use of quantum computing can help investors ensure they accrue more money than regret.

Inside the glass-walled headquarters of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington County, some of the nation’s most talented scientists are working fast to usher in the quantum age in service of national defense.

Once entirely theoretical, the quantum sciences have slowly but surely become applied sciences, opening the door for technologies that take advantage of our improved understanding of physics at the smallest imaginable scales — even if things can be difficult to wrap your head around at first.