Alexandra Boltasseva, Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

A professor in Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Alexandra Boltasseva, Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is among a diverse group of 180 exceptional individuals in the 2022 class, which was chosen from a pool of nearly 2,500 applicants. Guggenheim fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

In all, 51 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 81 different academic institutions, 31 states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 33 to 75. Boltasseva was one of three individuals selected in the field of Engineering for her topic “Empowering Quantum Nanophotonics with Machine Learning: Towards Quantum On-Chip Meta-Devices.”

Boltasseva says she is honored and humbled to be recognized as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

"I am particularly excited that the grant’s topic on 'Empowering Quantum Nanophotonics with Machine Learning: Towards Quantum On-Chip Meta-Devices' leverages the most recent investment by the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Elmore Center on ‘Crossroads of Quantum and AI,’” says Boltasseva. “It also synergistically fits into Purdue’s large effort under the Quantum Science Center (QSC), a National Quantum Information Science Research Center of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). I am very thankful to the Foundation and to all my colleagues within ECE, PQSEI and the QSC for providing the most inspirational collaborative environment and to all my students and postdocs for their remarkable and hard work!”

Boltasseva holds 11 U.S. patents and one patent in Japan. Her contributions to the field of plasmonics are opening up new ways to focus and manipulate light at the nanometer scale. Boltasseva’s innovations have inspired low-power nanometer-scale optical and optoelectronic components such as tiny optical modulators and photodetectors, as well as nanoscale power-efficient light sources that have the potential to transform the fields of opto- and nanoelectronics, on-chip optical communication, and data recording storage and transmission.

Among a select list of Boltasseva’s awards, she has been named to the list of Highly Cited Researchers from the Web of Science Group twice, in 2020 and 2021, she is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2020), she was a finalist for the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists in Physical Sciences and Engineering (2018), Materials Research Society Young Investigator Award (2013), IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award (2013), and MIT Technology Review’s Global List of Innovators Under 35 (2011). She is a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE - 2020), Optical Society of America (OSA - 2015) and International Society for Optical Engineers (SPIE - 2017).