Anuradha Murthy (Anu) Agarwal is an Indian-American electrical engineer specializing in photonic integrated circuits. She is a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the Electronic Materials Research Group of MIT's Microphotonics Center and Materials Research Laboratory. [1]
Agarwal is originally from India; her mother was a botanist and her father was an academic and documentary filmmaker. [2] She earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from Boston University in 1994. [3] Next, she became a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, working there with Lionel Kimerling, [2] and has remained there since, with the exception of three years from 2001 to 2004 working with Clarendon Photonics, where she was developing a novel optical filter. [3]
Agarwal was named a Fellow of Optica, in the 2022 class of fellows, "for pioneering contributions to integrated mid-infrared photonic sensing, detection, imaging, and leadership in training the next generation in photonics manufacturing". [2]
Naomi J. Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry, and physics at Rice University. She is also the founding director of Rice University Laboratory for Nanophotonics, and the Smalley-Curl Institute. She invented the first nanoparticle with tunable plasmonic resonances, which are controlled by their shape and structure, and has won numerous awards for her pioneering work in the field of nanophotonics and plasmonics. She was also part of a team that developed the first dark pulse soliton in 1987 while working for IBM.
Michal Lipson is an American physicist known for her work on silicon photonics. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2019, Lipson was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow for contributions to silicon photonics especially towards enabling GHz silicon active devices. Until 2014, she was the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering at Cornell University in the school of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Cornell. She is now the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. In 2009 she co-founded the company PicoLuz, which develops and commercializes silicon nanophotonics technologies. In 2019, she co-founded Voyant Photonics, which develops next generation lidar technology based on silicon photonics. In 2020 Lipson was elected the 2021 vice president of Optica, and serves as the Optica president in 2023.
Ann Catrina Coleman FIEEE FOSA is a Scottish electrical engineer and professor at the University of Texas at Dallas specialising in semiconductor lasers.
Gisele Bennett was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Director of the GTRI Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). She also founded the Logistics and Maintenance Applied Research Center (LandMARC) at GTRI.
Constance J. Chang-Hasnain is chairperson and founder of Berxel Photonics Co. Ltd. and Whinnery Professor Emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. She was President of Optica in 2021.
Andrea Alù is an Italian American scientist and engineer, currently Einstein Professor of Physics at The City University of New York Graduate Center. He is known for his contributions to the fields of optics, photonics, plasmonics, and acoustics, most notably in the context of metamaterials and metasurfaces. He has co-authored over 650 journal papers and 35 book chapters, and he holds 11 U.S. patents.
Lionel Cooper Kimerling is an American materials scientist, known for his work in the field of semiconductor materials and their processing. As of 2016, he is the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He headed the Materials Physics Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1981 to 1990.
Jelena Vučković is a Serbian-born American professor and a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. She served as Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from August 2021 through June 2023. Vučković leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics (NQP) Lab, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE Institute, SIMES Institute, and Bio-X at Stanford. She was the inaugural director of the Q-FARM initiative. She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of The Optical Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Alexandra Boltasseva is Ron And Dotty Garvin Tonjes Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, and editor-in-chief for The Optical Society's Optical Materials Express journal. Her research focuses on plasmonic metamaterials, manmade composites of metals that use surface plasmons to achieve optical properties not seen in nature.
Keren Bergman is an American electrical engineer who is the Charles Batchelor Professor at Columbia University. She also serves as the director of the Lightwave Research Laboratory, a silicon photonics research group at Columbia University. Her research focuses on nano-photonics and particularly optical interconnects for low power, high bandwidth computing applications.
Hatice Altug is a Turkish physicist and professor in the Bioengineering Department and head of the Bio-nanophotonic Systems laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland. Her research focuses on nanophotonics for biosensing and surface enhanced spectroscopy, integration with microfluidics and nanofabrication, to obtain high sensitivity, label-free characterization of biological material. She has developed low-cost biosensor allowing the identification of viruses such as Ebola that can work in difficult settings and therefore particularly useful in case of pandemics.
Hannah J. Joyce is an Australian scientist and engineer, and a professor at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Her research specialises in the development of new nanomaterials for applications in optoelectronics and energy harvesting. She has received several awards for her work in nanowire engineering and terahertz photonics.
Audrey K. Ellerbee Bowden is an American engineer and Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips Chancellor's Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University, as well as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. She is a Fellow of Optica, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE).
Joyce Poon is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and Director of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, where her research focuses on developing new optical devices for applications in neurotechnology. She is also an honorary professor at the Technical University of Berlin. She is a Fellow of Optica, and has been serving as a Director-At-Large for the society since January 2021.
Shouleh Nikzad is an Iranian-American electronic engineer and research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She leads the Advanced Detector Arrays, Systems, and Nanoscience Group. Her research considers ultraviolet and low-energy particle detectors, nanostructure devices and novel spectrometers. Nikzad is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the National Academy of Inventors and SPIE.
Carmen S. Menoni is an Argentine-American physicist who is the University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. Her research considers oxide materials for interference coatings and spectrometry imaging. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, American Physical Society, Optica, and SPIE. Menoni served as the President of the IEEE Photonics Society from 2020 to 2021.
Winnie N. Ye is a Canadian electronics engineer specializing in silicon-based photonics. She is a professor of electronics at Carleton University.
Raymond G. Beausoleil is an American scientist working at the Hewlett Packard Labs Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory. He was made a fellow of the IEEE in 2023.
Anna C. Peacock is an electrical engineer specialising in photonics and fiber optics. Originally from New Zealand, she works in the UK as professor of photonics at the University of Southampton, where she heads the Nonlinear Semiconductor Photonics group of the Optoelectronics Research Centre.
Andrea Blanco-Redondo is a Spanish photonics engineer and physicist who works at the University of Central Florida as Florida Photonics Center of Excellence (FPCE) Endowed Professor in the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL). She is known for her discovery of optical quartic solitons; her research interests also include topological photonics, quantum optics, nanophotonics, photonic crystals, and slow light.