Ray Chen is the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair at The University of Texas Austin. Chen is the director of the Nanophotonics and Optical Interconnects Research Lab, at the Microelectronics Research Center. He is the director of the AFOSR MURI-Center for Power-Efficient Silicon Nanophotonics for Optical Computing and Interconnects. From 2008 to 2013 he also led a MURI center for Silicon Nanomembrane involving faculty from Stanford, UIUC, Rutgers, and UT Austin. A myriad of commercially available devices and systems are available in the market from these basic research programs. He received his BS degree in Physics in 1980 from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, his MS degree in physics in 1983, and his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering in 1988, both from the University of California. He joined UT Austin in 1992 to start the optical interconnect research program. From 1988 to 1992 Chen worked as a research scientist, manager, and director of the Department of Engineering at the Physical Optics Corporation in Torrance, California.
Members
Andreas Beling received the Dipl.-Phys. degree (M.S.) in physics from the University of Bonn, Germany, in 2000 and the Dr.-Ing. degree (Ph.D.) in electrical engineering from Technical University Berlin, Germany, in 2006. He was a staff scientist in the photonics division at the Heinrich-Hertz-Institute in Berlin in 2001-2006, a Research Associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia in 2006-2008, and has two years of industry experience as a project manager working on coherent receivers for high-speed optical systems. He returned to University of Virginia and became Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2013.
Joe C. Campbell received the B.S. Degree in Physics for the University of Texas at Austin in 1969, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971 and 1973, respectively. From 1974 to 1976 he was employed by Texas Instruments where he worked on integrated optics. In 1976 he joined the staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. In the Crawford Hill Laboratory he worked on a variety of optoelectronic devices including semiconductor lasers, optical modulators, waveguide switches, photonic integrated circuits, and photodetectors with emphasis on high-speed avalanche photodiodes for high-bit-rate lightwave systems. In January of 1989 he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering. In January of 2006, Professor Campbell moved to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as the Lucian Carr Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
David Z. Pan received his PhD degree in Computer Science from UCLA in 2000. He was a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2000 to 2003. He is currently a Professor and holder of the Engineering Foundation Endowed Professorship #1 at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin.
Dennis Prather began his professional career by joining the US Navy in 1982, where he still serves in the reserves and serves as a CAPT (O-6) Engineering Duty Officer. After active duty, he received the BSEE, MSEE, and PhD from the University of Maryland in 1989, 1993, and 1997, respectively. During this time he worked as a senior research engineer for the Army Research Laboratory, where he performed research on both optical devices and architectures for information processing.
Co-PI Volker J. Sorger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the director of the Orthogonal Physics Enabled Nanophotonics (OPEN) Lab at the George Washington University. His research areas include opto-electronics, nanophotonics, intelligent information processing, and photonic AI systems.
Alan Wang is the Mearse Endowed Chair Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. Before joining Baylor University, he was a faculty member at Oregon State University and was promoted to full professor in 2022. His current research spans over photonic integrated circuits, nanophotonic devices, and various nano-scale optical sensors based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering, infrared absorption, and fluorescence imaging.
