Photonics Research Group
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Let's get started with some important highlights from the Photonics
Research Group.
This year we could welcome one more ERC Grant holder among our professors: Prof. Bart Kuyken received a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for the Electric project. That brings our total ERC holders to 6 (ERC Advanced Grant for Roel, ERC Consolidator Grant for Wim and the ERC Starting Grants for Dries, Gunther, Peter & now Bart). Prof. Roel Baets also secured a second ERC Proof of Concept project grant this year, called 'MIRASPEC'.
Prof. Roel Baets has been elected as
Director-at-Large of OSA (The Optical Society) and Wim became OSA Senior Member.
On the proposal side: you win some, you loose some (although the balance of winning is not always in our favour). But anyway, we are pleased to engage in the following projects: H2020 MORPHIC (as coordinator), Actphast 4.0, FUN-Comp, HOT, Aquarius, H2020 Pilot Line: PIXAPP, VLAIO: Fantoam & PerSpectrum, INTERREG: Safeside & Terafood.
Artur received a renewal of his FWO PhD-grant and Frederic
receives FWO Postdoc-grant. Last month,
four FWO Strategic Basic Research
Doctoral Grants were awarded to members of the Photonics Research Group, so
congrats to Chonghuai, Camiel, Mattias and Gilles.
UGent launched a call to set up expertise centers and we were happy to see
both of our proposals accepted. The expertise centre
NaMiFab
offers expertise and services to UGent partners or partners outside UGent for
everything related to cleanroom processes (test and research infrastructure
for nano- and microfabrication).
NB-Photonics
will also offer expertise and services to the UGent research community but
has a focus on on-chip silicon photonics.
Prof. Bogaerts organized for the first time a
Specialist Course on
PIC Design. The course lasted for an entire week and had
participants from both UGent but also a fair number from universities across
the globe. In a second stage, the chip they've designed was actually
fabricated and measured.
Our very first spin-off
Trinean has been acquired by
Unchained Labs this year but the company will still be based in Flanders on
keep on doing their great work. The Lithuanian semiconductor company
Brolis also opended a Ghent
Research Hub to expand their activities. We are looking forward to continue
our collaboration with Brolis in the future.
We also welcome a new IOF Business Developer, dr. ir.
Eva Ryckeboer (after Danaë has left to start our spin-off
Indigo last year). We wish her the best of luck in this new career path and
hope to welcome more spin-offs in the near future!
Our researchers did a great job again this year which resulted in a lot of papers and
more important great results.
At Photonics West (January '17), we had 6 invited and one regular paper. At ECIO (April '17), we had one invited
talk and 10 papers accepted. At CLEO (May '17), we were very pleased to have a postdeadline paper accepted. At ECOC (September
'17), we've doubled that number and had two postdeadline papers accepted.
Without listing all publications of 2017, we would like to highlight some
very nice results obtained:
We would also like to congratulate the group member who successfully completed their PhD and are now officially Doctor of Photonics Engineering: Ashywn Srinivasan, Ang Li, Suzanne Bisschop, Yunpeng Zhu, Saurav Kumar, Soren Dhoore & Koen Alexander!
Next to people leaving the group, we could welcome the following new faces: Ewoud, Kenny, Naidi, Cenk, Zheng, Banafsheh, Deng, Alex, Zuyang, Iman, Xiaofeng, Maximilien & Emmanuel. Welcome to the group! And we are also hosting some visiting researchers as well: so a big welcome to Hanna & Yang.
Work hard, play hard ... So, we hosted our annual Group Dinner on the lawn in front of our new building. Beautiful weather, an icecream truck, outdoor activities, a bouncy castle for the kids (and for some of our researchers as well), a delicious BBQ and some good music & drinks afterwards. We've also had our annual teambuilding activity Group Away Day for which we used rafts to navigate (based on hints & clues where to go next) through the canals of Ghent, end up at a pizza foodtruck at the recreational site 'Blaarmeersen' and spend an afternoon with teambuilding activities (quiz, gesture game, bouncy castle fun run, PRG Guess Who?, zorb football, ...). Besides that, we also had a lot of goodbye-parties, the breakfasts before the monthly group meeting & birthday treats. So, 2017 had indeed a lot of play in store (besides a lot of hard work as well).
Work hard and not only in the offices. This year we went with the entire
(80+) group on our biannual retreat. We (again) went to the Belgian coast to
spent three days packed with lectures from the professors (giving a research
overview and looking forward to the future); lectures from the technical
staff on IT, Cleanroom, Measurement Labs, Simulation software; session on
IP, spin-offs, patents and our industrial collaborations; several skill
session whereby the more senior members exchanged knowledge with the
juniors; ...
Of course, we had some leisure-activities as well. The infamous Photonics
Quiz (which deals with everything besides photonics) and a interactive (with
3D goggles) talk by prof.
Karel Van Acoleyen (UGent Science Faculty) who took us on a
virtual boattrip through Ghent with Einstein in order to try to explain the
relativity-theory to a bunch of engineers...
We also engage in public outreach; just to name a few things we've done this year: Andreas (once more) assisted a group of secundary school students from Sint-Bavohumaniora 6WW8 in QuantumSpinOff competition which resulted in winning the Silver Award. Ghent University also celebrated his 200th birthday and during a day-long Science Festival, we organized a Lightpainting workshop for primary school kids and had a LIDAR-demo in De Krook which attracted the attention from a lot of people passing by.
Looking forward to 2019, we can already make some announcements: