Plenary Speakers

Roel Baets is full professor at Ghent University where he leads a mixed UGent – imec team. For about 40 years he has worked in the field of integrated photonics, in multiple material platforms (silicon, silicon nitride, III-V). He has made diverse scientific contributions to this field, as well as to its applications and spin-off creation in telecom, datacom and sensing. He has led major research projects in silicon photonics in Europe and founded ePIXfab, the globally first Multi-Project-Wafer service for silicon photonics and now the European Silicon Photonics Alliance. In recent years his research has focused on medical and environmental sensing applications of silicon photonics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, of the European Optical Society (EOS) and of the Optical Society (OSA). He has been a recipient of the 2018 PIC-International Lifetime Achievement Award and of the 2020 John Tyndall award.

Dirk Englund received his BS in Physics from Caltech in 2002. After a Fulbright fellowship at T.U. Eindhoven, he completed an MS in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 2008. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined Columbia University as Assistant Professor of E.E. and of Applied Physics. He joined the MIT EECS faculty in 2013. Major recognitions include the 2011 Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the 2011 Sloan Fellowship in Physics, the OSA’s 2017 Adolph Lomb Medal, the Bose Research Fellowship in 2018, and a Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2020. He is an Optica Fellow.

Shanhui Fan is the Joseph and Hon Mai Goodman Professor in the School of Engineering, a Professor of Electrical Engineering, a Professor of Applied Physics (by courtesy), and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy, at the Stanford University. He received his Ph. D in 1997 in theoretical condensed matter physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research interests are in fundamental studies of solid state and photonic structures and devices, especially photonic crystals, plasmonics, and meta-materials, and applications of these structures in energy and information technology applications. He has published over 600 refereed journal articles, has given over 380 plenary/keynote/invited talks, and holds over 70 US patents. He has cofounded two companies aiming to commercialize high-speed engineering computations and radiative cooling technology respectively. Prof. Fan received a National Science Foundation Career Award (2002), a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2003), the U. S. National Academy of Sciences W. O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research (2007), the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America (2007), a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the U. S. Department of Defense (2017), a Simons Investigator in Physics (2021), and the R. W. Wood Prize from Optica (2022). He is a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher since 2015, and a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the SPIE.