Michal Lipson

Michal Lipson (born 1970) is an American physicist known for her work on silicon photonics. Lipson was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow for contributions to silicon photonics especially towards enabling GHz silicon active devices . Until 2014, she was the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering at Cornell University in the school of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Cornell. She is now a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. According to Google Scholar, her publications have been cited over 22,500 times, and she has an h-index of 78 as of November 5, 2015.

Education

After spending two years as a BS student at the Instituto de Física of the University of São Paulo, Dr. Lipson obtained a BS in physics from The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1992. She went on to obtain a PhD in physics from the same university in 1998, with the thesis topic "Coupled Exciton-Photon Modes in Semiconductor Optical Microcavities." Dr. Lipson spent 2 years as a postdoctoral associate with Lionel Kimerling at MIT, and then accepted a position at Cornell University in 2001.

Research

Dr. Lipson is best known for her work on silicon photonics. She developed (along with other researchers around the world at IBM, Intel, Ghent University) silicon photonic components such as waveguide couplers, ring resonators, modulators, detectors, WDM wavelength sources and sensors on silicon platform. She published the first paper on a class of versatile waveguides known as Slot-waveguides in 2004, which has since been cited over one thousand times. In all her work has been cited over 22,000 times. She was also the first to demonstrate optical parametric gain in silicon, which was considered an important step towards building optical amplifiers in silicon.

Lipson's McArthur fellowship citation mentions her work in ring modulators (circular waveguides) as the key contribution of Lipson via the continued refinement of both opto-electronic and purely optical circuits for smaller size, increased efficiency, and accelerated switching speed The resulting silicon-based photonic integrated circuits have the potential to improve signal transmission and processing dramatically.

Dr. Lipson has received numerous honors, including being the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and an NSF Young Investigator Career award. She is also an elected fellow of Optical Society of America (OSA). Her current research interests include optical metamaterials, low-power and compact optical modulators, and slot waveguides. Her work has appeared in Nature, Nature Photonics, and other journals.

Selected works

• Slot waveguides:

• Nonlinear optics in silicon

• Modulation in silicon

External links

• Dr. Lipson's group website at Columbia University.
• Dr. Lipson's personal page.
• Press coverage of Ultrafast Oscilloscope.