Currently, a very large fraction of the high-performance computing usage world-wide is devoted to solving the electronic structure problem, that is, approximating the ground state energy of fermionic Hamiltonians, which permeates research in computational chemistry and materials science. This makes simulating many-body quantum systems one of the most appealing applications of quantum computing. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss the main challenges that this entails in the near term, from noise to scalability, as well as a strategy to tackle them using the many advantages of informationally complete measurements. In the second part of the talk, I will present a new and intuitive framework to design and understand fermion-to-qubit mappings, that is, transformations like the well-known Jordan-Wigner and Bravyi-Kitaev ones, which enable describing electrons using multi-qubit systems. Finally, I will explain how this framework can be used to generate mappings tailored for specific hardware, such as IBM quantum computers.