Integrated Photonics for Data Communication Applications

Dr. Madeleine Glick is a Senior Research Scientist at Columbia University where her current research focuses on applications of photonic devices and optical interconnects to bandwidth dense, energy efficient computing systems. Madeleine received her Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University in 1989. She subsequently conducted research on optical properties of III-V materials at the Department of Physics, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) Lausanne, Switzerland. She was also a Research Associate with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. In the early 2000s Madeleine initiated and led research activities on the use of photonics in computer networks. From 2002-2011 she was Principal Engineer at Intel Research leading research on optical interconnects for data centers where she led one of the first research groups to explore optical interconnects and optical switching for computer networks and data centers. While at Intel, she initiated and led projects exploring digital signal processing (DSP) for optical links - an impactful research collaboration with University College London and Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has extended to research and collaborations with industry and universities, including University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, MIT and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Madeleine’s contributions have been recognized in both the photonics and computing communities. She is one of the few optics researchers to have been published by top-tier computing conferences (Sigcomm 2016, SC19, SC20) and to be invited to the technical committee of the major supercomputing conference (SC18-SC22; Vice Chair of the Networks and Architectures subcommittee SC18). Madeleine is a Fellow of Optica and the Institute of Physics UK (IOP). In 2022 she received the Distinguished Service Award from the IEEE Photonics Society. Dr. Liao Ling is an Intel Fellow and chief architect of photonic integration in Intel’s Silicon Photonics Product Division. She joined Intel in 1997 and spearheaded research in high-speed silicon modulation, optical transmitter integration, and co-packaged optics. She currently leads the development of multi terabit per second photonic engines to be co-packaged with switch SOCs and XPUs for future power, cost, and bandwidth density scaling. Ling earned her B.S. and M.S. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Surrey in the UK. Dr. Katharine Schmidtke is Director of Sourcing for ASICs and Custom Silicon at Facebook. Over the past five years she led Facebook’s Optical Technology strategy and worked closely with OCP to specify the 100G-CWDM4-OCP optical transceiver optimized for data center applications. Katharine obtained a Ph.D. in non-linear optics from Southampton University in the UK and completed post-doctoral research at Stanford University.