Jacob Khurgin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, is known for his diverse and eclectic research in the areas of optics, electronics, condensed matter physics, and telecommunications.
Much of Khurgin’s work lies at the intersection of optics and solid-state electronics. He has focused on an array of topics during his career, including the optics of semiconductor nanostructures, nonlinear optical devices, lasers, optical communications, microwave photonics, and condensed matter physics. His most recent work involves mid-infrared optical frequency combs, metamaterials, optical refrigeration of solids, and phonon engineering for high-frequency transistors, to name a few.
The insights that have emerged from his research have led to numerous inventions ranging from small appliances, such as electric shavers and coffeemakers, to sophisticated systems for laser communication and chemical detection. He has published roughly 40 patents to date.
Khurgin has consulted for numerous companies over the years, including Philips Electronics, IBM, AT&T, and Hewlett Packard. His work has been funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Office of Naval Research, National Science Foundation, NASA, and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR).
He is a member of the American Physical Society Joint Council on Quantum Electronics and has served as a technical program committee member for more than 60 academic conferences. He has held visiting professorships at numerous institutions, including Princeton, UCLA, Brown, ETH in Zurich, and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He was named a Fellow by the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.
Khurgin is an associate editor for Optica, a premier journal of Optical Society of America, and has reviewed papers for at least a dozen journals, including Science, Nature, and Proceedings of National Academy of Science. He has published eight book chapters, 340 papers in refereed journals, and a book: “Slow Light – Science and Applications.”
Khurgin earned his BS and MS in Optics from the Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1977 and 1979, respectively. He immigrated to the United States in 1980 and spent eight years working as a researcher at Philips Laboratories in New York. He earned a PhD in Electro-Physics from New York University in 1987 and joined Johns Hopkins in 1988.