Curriculum Vitae.

With over 50 patents and 80 publications in journals including Nature, Nature Photonics, and Nature Physics, Nicholas’ seminal work on quantum and classical information processing with integrated photonics has helped launch the international research field of programmable photonics. Nicholas has been recognized by the MIT Technology Review through the Innovators Under 35 award (2021); 30 judges, including Andrew Ng, selected from over 500 nominees. Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), and Jony Ive (Apple). He received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and then a Postdoctoral Fellow through the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship.

 

Jobs

Founder, President, CEO

Sep 2017 -- Present

  • Leading the company and building culture, teams, and chips. Raised more than $450mm USD from investors including Sequoia, GV (Google Ventures) and Spark Capital. Engineering, product, marketing, core IP.

MIT

Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow

Sep 2017 - Jan 2018

  • Leading efforts towards development of a photonic processor purpose-built for AI computing, mentoring graduate students, grant proposal writing.

R&D Product Engineer

Jan 2009 - Jun 2011

  • Characterization and modeling of ballistic transport of electrons in 24~nm transistors for DRAM and NAND.

  • Discovered a problem in the manufacturing process using the Row Hammer test and debugged it--saving Micron an estimated $100M USD.

Education

MIT

PhD, Course 6

Jul 2013 — Sep 2017

  • Leading the quantum optics and silicon photonics teams in Dirk Englund's Quantum Photonics Lab.

UW

MSc, EE

Jun 2011 — Jul 2013

  • Silicon photonics and the OpSIS MPW platform.

BSc, EE

UI

Sep 2005 - May 2009

  • Capstone: collaboration with NASA Ames on micrometeoroid orbital debris impact detection for Orion.

Awards

Boston Globe’s Tech Power Players 50 (2024)

Introducing the top New England CEOs, venture capitalists, and founders of 2024

Photonics100 (2022)

The Photonics100 is a list from Electro Optics that spotlights the people in our industry who drive things forward – the innovators, the boundary pushers, the disruptors and the ‘out-of-the-box’ thinkers.

MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 (2021)

The editors of MIT Tech Review have named you one of this year’s Innovators Under 35. Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google co-founders; Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder; Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer.

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2012)

Proposal on terabit-per-second optical chip-to-chip links.

Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017)

Proposal on post-Moore’s law computing with photonics.

MIT $100K Grand Prize

Leader and speaker for team Lightmatter.

Harvard President’s Challenge Grand Prize

Leader and speaker for team Lightmatter.

Publications

Select Publications

  • Nature vol. 591, pgs. 229-233 (2021)

  • Nature Physics vol. 16, pgs. 322–327 (2020)

  • Nature Photonics vol. 11, pgs. 447–452(2017)

  • Nature Photonics vol. 11, pgs. 441–446(2017)

  • Nature Comms. vol. 6, no. 5873 (2015)

  • Phys. Rev. X 4, 041047 (2014)

Select Patents

US10,158,481, US10,268,232, US10,359,272, US10,608,663, US10,619,993, US10,740,693, US10,763,974, US10,768,659, US9,354,039, US16/411,391, US16/653,159, US16/671,726, US16/680,908, US16/810,573, US16/915,023, US16/986,383, US16/986,655

Press

Wired Magazine, Bloomberg, Forbes, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, Nature, Science, Scientific American, Anandtech, Tom’s Hardware, TechCrunch

Hobbies

Freestyle skiing, mountain biking, bouldering, electrodynamics, quantum optics, computer architecture