P. Aaron Lott is a senior research scientist and program manager in the Research Institute of Advanced Computer Science at USRA and is a research staff member of the NASA Ames Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prior to joining USRA he worked as a senior applied research scientist and director of product management at D-Wave systems. Aaron earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and scientific computation at the University of Maryland, College Park, and performed post-doctoral research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Aaron has worked on development of the D-Wave 2X, D-Wave 2000Q hardware and software features as well as several research projects exploring algorithms, benchmarking, and development of quantum computers in optimization, machine learning and materials science applications.