Li receives a DARPA Young Faculty Award

Qing Li is the recipient of a prestigious 2019 Young Faculty Award from the US Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He received the award based on his research proposal titled "Visible and mid-infrared frequency comb generation in wide-bandgap photonic materials." In this project, Li’s team will develop a novel integrated photonics platform for the efficient implementation of various nonlinear optical processes on chip. Microresoantor frequency combs, which are useful for a wide range of applications, will be generated in the visible and mid-infrared range based on wide-bandgap photonic materials such as silicon carbide and aluminum nitride.

The DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) recognizes "rising research stars" who hold junior faculty positions at academic institutions in the United States, with the goal of developing the next generation of scientists who will address national security challenges. Award winners receive up to three years of grant funding and mentorship opportunities with Department of Defense (DoD) contacts.

Li is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013. Before joining Carnegie Mellon University, he worked as a CNST/UMD postdoctoral researcher in National Institute of Standards and Technology. His work developed techniques for chip-scale quantum frequency conversion, octave-spanning microresonator frequency combs for optical frequency synthesis, and photonic interfaces for interrogating rubidium atomic systems. Li has received the Outstanding Graduate Student (Colonel Oscar P. Cleaver) Award and Sigma Xi Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from Georgia Institute of Technology. He also won the Sigma Xi Most Outstanding Poster in Modeling, Simulation and Physics in NIST.

The current interest of Li's group focuses on the development of novel photonic materials/device technologies on the chip scale for both classical and quantum information processing. In addition, Li is also an active member of Pittsburgh Quantum Institute (PQI) to promote quantum science and engineering in the Pittsburgh area.