In this fireside chat, Dr. Anna Grassellino, Chief Technology Officer and Associate Lab Director of Fermilab, joins Quantum Machines CEO Dr. Itamar Sivan for a conversation that moves from personal journey to national strategy. Anna traces her path from a summer internship at Fermilab in 2004 to leading the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center (SQMS), and how decades of work on ultra-high-quality superconducting cavities for particle accelerators carried over into quantum computing. She lays out SQMS’s goals for its second funding cycle: a 100-qudit system by 2030, continued breakthroughs in coherence, and a demonstration unit cell for a quantum computing data center, including links between fridges and large-scale cryogenics. She also shares a recent milestone, a multimode structure with 57 high-quality modes, and the plan to open the first qudit platforms to users in 2028, built with Quantum Machines as the control partner. The conversation also covers how Fermilab already uses quantum sensing to search for dark matter, why talent moving into startups and industry counts as a success, and why the field must balance aggressive near-term roadmaps with the fundamental research that will decide which architectures win in the 2030s.