Dr. Yurii Vlasov

Title: Silicon Integrated Nanophotonics: a journey from fundamental science to disruptive technology
Date:  Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 11 a.m.
Location:  Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street, room 224

Abstract: Silicon Integrated Nanophotonics allows ultra-dense monolithic single-chip integration of optical and electrical functions. This technology can enable future supercomputers capable of delivering Exaflops (10^18 floating point operations per second) by connecting racks, modules, and chips together with ultra-low power massively parallel optical interconnects. Such a disruptive technology is a result of a decade of multidisciplinary exploration of various scientific fields in material science, fundamental physics and optics, advanced device engineering and technology qualification.

Bio: Dr. Yurii Vlasov is the Manager of Silicon Nanophotonics Department at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center.  His main thrust is in the development of optical interconnects based on nanophotonics structures for future Exascale computing systems.  Prior to IBM, Dr. Vlasov developed semiconductor photonic crystals at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, and at the Strasbourg IPCMS Institute, France. He also was, for over a decade, a Research Scientist with the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology in St. Petersburg, Russia working on optics of semiconductors and photonic crystals.  He received his MS from the University of St.Petersburg (1988) and PhD from the Ioffe Institute (1994), both in physics. 

Dr. Vlasov has published over 100 highly cited journal papers, filed over 30 US patents, and delivered over 150 invited and plenary talks in the area of nanophotonics.  He served on numerous organizing committees of conferences on nanophotonics under OSA, IEEE, LEOS, APS, MRS, etc. Dr. Vlasov was elected a Fellow of both the OSA and the APS, as well as a Senior Member of the IEEE.  He was awarded several Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards from IBM and was named a scientist of the year by the Scientific American journal.  Dr. Vlasov also served for a few years as an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Department of Electrical Engineering.