Group Members

Faculty

Alejandro Rodriguez

I received B.S. and PhD degrees in Physics from MIT in 2006 and 2010 and held joint post-doctoral positions at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and at the Department of Mathematics at MIT. I was born in Havana, Cuba—a byproduct of loud rumbas, a family of physics enthusiasts, and afro-cuban folklore—and emigrated to the US at the age of twelve. When I am not thinking about photons, I am in some superposition of dancing salsa, watching old films, playing piano, listening to Cuban music, and playing video games. You are welcome to check out my curriculum vitae along with some of my personal interests

Postdoctoral Researchers

Rodrick Kuate Defo

Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow @ Princeton (2021). Currently investingating theoretical limits on photonic structures, particularly related to achieving stronger light--matter interactions. He received his B.Sc. from McGill University in the Joint Honours Program in Physics and Mathematics in 2013 and his PhD in Physics from Harvard University in 2020.

Graduate Students

Alessio Amaolo

Graduate Student @ Chemistry Department (2022). He received his B.S. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2021. His research is focused on using techniques from convex optimization to find physical bounds on photonic device performance. 

Thomas Maldonado

Graduate Student @ ECE Department (2022) He received his B.A. degree in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University. His research is focused on modeling the electrodynamics of superconducting materials and devices, with an eye toward applications in quantum technologies.

Jewel Mohajan

Graduate Student @ ECE Department (2019). He received his B.S. and M.S. degree in EEE from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and also served as a lecturer in the same institution, where he worked on nanowire field-effect transistors. He is currently interested in the development of physical bounds on nanophotonics devices.

Benjamin Strekha

Graduate Student @ ECE Department (2019). He received his B.S degree in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania. His interests lie in physics, math, electricalengineering, and computational science. He enjoys topics which mix these fields, in accordance to the Goldilocks principle. He is interested in using rigorous mathematics to model the physics of practical devices. Often the analytics can only go so far, so that is where computational techniques come in to help make progress. He is currently working on developing bounds on the observables and devices common in electromagnetism.

Former Members

Hudson Loughlin

Graduate Student @ MIT (2021).  He was a senior in the Physics Department that worked on problems related to the modeling of superconducting qubits in topological regimes. 

Pengning Chao

Instructor @ MIT (2023). He was a PhD student in ECE who graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017 with a double major in Physics and Mathematics. He made several contributions to nonlinear optimization and our understanding of electromagnetic limits. He is currently an instructor at the MIT Mathematics Department. 

Theodoros Koutserimpas

Postdoctoral Fellow @ Cornell University (2022), he worked on problems related to microwaves, optics, acoustics, quantum mechanics and applying numerical and analytical methods to problems dealing with wave phenomena. He received the Diploma degree from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Athens, Greece and the PhD degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, both in electrical engineering.

Sean Molesky

Assistant Professor @ Polytechnique Montreal (2021). He was a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NRSEC) Postdoctoral Fellow working on problems related to inverse design, EM asymptotics, and thermal physics. He received bachelors and PhD degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Alberta in 2011 and 2016.  

Shengyuan Lu

Graduate Student @ Harvard (2021). She was an undergraduate student in the Physics Department at Princeton and worked on problems related to the modeling of near-field radiative heat transfer in photovoltaic cells.

Teerit J. Vongkovit

Graduate Student @ Princeton University (2020).  He was a junior in the Physics Department. He worked on problems related to the modeling of vander Waals interactions in macromolecular systems.

Prashanth Venkataram

Postdoctoral Fellow @ U. C. Davis (2020).  He was a PhD student in Princeton EE. He received his B.S. degree in Physics from MIT in 2014, where he worked in nanophotonics. He made several contributions to the physics of thermal fluctuations in complex systems, including van der Waals interactions and heat transport at mesoscopic scales. He became a postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis Institute for Transportation Studies in 2020.

Weiliang Jin

Postdoctoral Fellow @ Stanford (2019).  He received a B.S degree in Physics from Peking University in 2014, where he studied subwavelength photonic devices. His interests revolved around developing general-purpose numerical and inverse-design techniques for applications in nonlinear optics and fluctuation phenomena. 

Bink Sitawarin

Graduate Student @ U. C. Berkeley (2018).  He was a senior in the EE Department working on problems related to second-harmonic generation in optical fibers and machine learning. He is currently a PhD student at U.C. Berkeley.

Zin Lin

Assistant Professor @ Virginia Tech (2022).  He was a PhD candidate at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, co-advised with Prof. Marko Loncar (Harvard).  His work in our group centered around photonics, nonlinear and quantum optics, and large-scale optimization of chip-scale photonic devices. He became a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in 2017.

Chinmay Khandekar

Postdoctoral Fellow @ Stanford (2017).  He received his PhD in 2017 on problems involving non-equilibrium fluctuations. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.

Jeremy Whitton

Graduate Student @ University of Arizona (2016). He was an undergraduate student in the Physics Department at Princeton who worked on problems related to the influence of Casimir forces on fluid surfaces. He is currently pursuing a PhD in astrophysics at Arizona State University.

Adi Pick

Assistant Professor of Applied Physics @ Hebrew University (2021).  She was a Ph.D student in the Physics Department at Harvard University, co-advised by Steven G. Johnson (MIT). She became a postdoctoral fellow at Technion in Israel in 2017.

Miloš Nikolić

Graduate Student @ University of Maryland (2015). He was an undergraduate student in the Physics Department at Princeton and worked on problems involving Casimir forces in microelectromechanical systems, offering guidance on experiments which demonstrated the first measurements of non-monotonic Casimir forces. Miloš went to pursue a PhD in biophysics at the University of Maryland in 2015.