Jelena Vuckovic, Stanford’s Director of Q-FARM, Receives $454,000 Prize for Her Laser-On-A-Chip Research

(Stanford.edu) The London-based Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has awarded Stanford electrical engineer and photonics researcher Jelena Vuckovic its $454,000 prize for her research into a new laser-on-a-chip that could revolutionize how focused beams of light are applied in applications such as fiber-optic communications, quantum computing and self-driving cars.
Vuckovic is the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership, professor of electrical engineering and, by courtesy, of applied physics at Stanford, where she leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. She is also a director of Q-FARM, the Stanford-SLAC Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative.
Vuckovic said the award would help support her lab’s continuing efforts to reduce the size and cost of titanium-sapphire lasers that emit bursts of red and near-infrared light. Today, such lasers are bulky, expensive, table-top instruments, making them better suited for research than for everyday applications. Vuckovic and her team are working to shrink these lasers to roughly the size of a sugar cube.