Zihe Gao
I’m a (tenure-track) Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University.
Education
PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2018
MS, Physics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2012
BS, Physics, Nanjing University, 2011
Short Bio
I obtained my PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Prof. Kent Choquette. My doctoral dissertation focuses on Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) and coupled VCSEL arrays. After that, I was recruited by Meta (Facebook Reality Labs, AR/VR) to work on ultra-miniaturized structured-light projectors and 3D vision systems. In 2020, I returned to academia as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Liang Feng’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania where I worked on topological photonics and quantum optics. Since August 2023, I’ve been an assistant professor at Auburn ECE.
Research Interests
My research interests emcompass optics, microelectronics, and physics. I had most of fun when I got to use all three of them. A significant portion of my past research has been devoted to the control of collective behaviors in multi-element and multimode photonic systems to build scalable and programmable integrated photonic chips for both classical and quantum applications (dynamically steerable laser sources, reconfigurable quantum optical sources, etc.).