Iain McKenzie
Organisation: European Space Agency Role: Senior optoelectronics engineer
Iain McKenzie has been a senior engineer at the ESA for more than 20 years and is responsible for managing the R&D of fibre optic and photonic components for future space applications. ‘Laser communications is widely
viewed as one of the big disruptive technologies that has the potential to change the way we communicate,’ he said, underlying his belief that the ‘development of a co-package optical engine for on-board satellite digital processing’ will be the most significant development in his research area.
‘I have been fortunate enough during my Roberto Morandotti
Organisation: Energy Materials Telecommunications Research Center, INRS Role: Professor
Morandotti is a pioneer in nonlinear, quantum, and terahertz optics. With 289 published articles in scientific journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Photonics, Nature Physics, and Physical Review Letters, he is one of the most cited scientists at INRS and in the University of Québec network and has more than 20 patent applications. He holds the Canada Research Chair in
Smart Photonics, is the scientific leader of INRS’s Ultrahigh Speed Light Manipulation Laboratory, and a member of the joint implementation committee of the INRS-UQO Joint Research Unit in Cybersecurity.
Based in: Montreal, Canada Education: PhD in Electrical Engineering, University of Glasgow
In November 2022, Morandotti received
the Marie-Victorin Award from the 2022 Prix du Québec, one of the Government of Quebec’s highest distinctions in science. ‘Over the course of my career, I have
been fortunate to meet and collaborate with fantastic students and postdoctoral fellows, outstanding mentors, and remarkable colleagues and support staff at all levels,’ he said on receiving the prize. ‘The main lesson I have learned is that, in science as in life, it is often more important to ask the right question, rather than to seek a generic or unhelpful answer.’
Pascual Muñoz
Organisation: Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) / VLC Photonics (VLC) Role: Professor & Director at UPVfab /
Pascual Muñoz and his team at UPVfab, the micro-fabrication R&D and pilot line cleanroom facility at Valencia Polytechnic University (UPV), are working on hybrid photonic integration to establish their own fabrication platform. Based on host silicon nitride technology, for additions of functional blocks from other photonic integration materials, ‘the goal is to develop photonic chips for several applications in forthcoming niche markets’, said Muñoz. A director of UPVfab, he said it had
secured infrastructure, team and funds for the coming two to three years. ‘Our challenge
Member of Board of Directors (VLC) Based in: Valencia, Spain Education: MSc & PhD Telecom Engineering
is to get it all up to speed and reach our first technology milestones in the shape of proof of concept for some photonic integrated circuit devices,’ he added. Muñoz also co-founded the UPV spin-off company VLC Photonics in 2011 and served as CEO from 2011 to 2013. Among those he cited as role models for his career were his VLC colleague Prof José Capmany, as well as Prof Carlos Domínguez and Prof Meint Smit. You can find Muñoz online at
www.linkedin. com/in/munozpascual/. He plans to attend PIC International and Semicon Europe.
Based in: Noordwijk, The Netherlands Education: BEng EEE, MPhil Optoelectronics
career to be exposed to both material and mechanical engineering and this has been immensely helpful, as so many of the problems that I face in my work in the end come down to materials and packaging,’ he said. McKenzie said the biggest challenge
his research area faces in the near term is ‘developing commercial optical terminals that will offer scalable solutions for satellite constellations’. You can find McKenzie online at linkedin. com/in/iain-mckenzie-830a9b/. He attends Industry Space Days at ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
44 Photonics100 2023
Simon Desbiens
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