ECE's Jacob earns prestigious, highly competitive Guggenheim Fellowship
The prominence of Zubin Jacob being named a 2026 Gugggenheim Fellow is a triumph not only for Purdue University and the College of Engineering, but also the field of engineering as a whole.
The 101st Class of Fellows includes 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines. Just three recipients hold engineering positions: Zubin and two others from Stanford University and The University of Houston, respectively.
Jacob, the Elmore Professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), is only the third Purdue faculty member to be named a fellow and the sole 2026 Purdue recipient.
“Zubin’s selection as a Guggenheim Fellow reflects the kind of bold, curiosity-driven research that defines Purdue Engineering. His work pushes the boundaries of what is possible, and it exemplifies our commitment to advancing knowledge that has profound impact on society," said Arvind Raman, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering.
The Guggenheim Fellowship is included on the National Research Council’s list of highly prestigious awards and considered an elite honor by the Purdue administration. Fellows are selected through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants. The 2026 class was tapped based on prior career achievement and exceptional promise.
The Guggenheim Foundation champions the talents of the fellows, whose passions often have broad and immediate social impact. Jacob’s proposed research project, which was submitted with his application, is titled, “Overcoming Fundamental Limits of Thermal Imaging with Neural Bolometers.”
“This recognition speaks to Zubin’s exceptional creativity and leadership in electrical and computer engineering. His ability to bridge theory and experiment while opening entirely new directions in imaging science is truly remarkable," said Milind Kulkarni, the Michael and Katherine Birck Head of ECE.
Jacob’s research seeks to dissolve the perceived limits of resolution in microscopy, thermal vision and space telescopy. The fellowship supports his work on a project to overcome the fundamental limits of thermal imaging.
“The Guggenheim Foundation has supported fellows across the arts, humanities and sciences for nearly a century,” Jacob said. “It is an honor to be recognized for the creativity that engineering research demands when you work close to the fundamental limits of what physics allows — the kind of work that often looks more like art than engineering in its earliest stages.”
As a doctoral student at Purdue, he proposed the optical hyperlens, a device based on hyberbolic metamaterials that enables subwavelength imaging in the far field. This was the first theoretical proposal of its kind, and his paper became one of the top 10 most cited in the journal Optics Express’ 20-year history. It launched a field that now produces more than 1,000 publications annually on hyberbolic photonics.
Since joining the Purdue faculty, Jacob has addressed a major limitation in human and robotic vision: perception under low-light and night-time conditions. Traditional thermal imaging fails to capture texture and detail due to the inherent noise in infrared data.
To overcome this noise limit, he led the development of heat-assisted detection and ranging (HADAR), a new framework combining infrared optics, thermal physics and machine learning. His group’s work, published in Nature, demonstrated that night-time thermal scenes can carry as much recoverable information as daylight.
His breakthrough has broad implications for autonomous navigation, defense, environmental sensing and planetary exploration. HADAR has received international recognition, been translated into multiple languages and has even been featured in science fiction literature for young readers.
“Our goal is to give machines the ability to see at night as effectively as humans see during the day,” Jacob said. “The Guggenheim Fellowship supports the researcher rather than a specific project, which is unusual and valuable. It lets me travel, work with collaborators on ideas that don’t yet fit any existing program, and push these thermal imaging concepts into new territory.”
Jacob disclosed HADAR to the Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization, which applied for a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to protect the intellectual property.
Most recently, Jacob has focused his attention on imaging the cosmos. For more than a century, telescope resolution has been fundamentally limited by the Rayleigh criterion, which ties resolving power to aperture size. This constraint has remained especially rigid in astronomy, where targets like exoplanets near stars are inherently faint and inaccessible.
Jacob founded Zetascope LLC in 2024. Zetascope is now collaborating with U.S. observatories to bring sub-Rayleigh imaging technologies to the field of astrophysics, enabling the discovery of earth-like exoplanets orbiting around distant stars.
“Purdue Engineering is a remarkably open and creative environment that has nurtured my unique style of combining theory and experiment,” Jacob said. “I’m a theorist by training, but Purdue gave me the launchpad to build an experimental lab, and the real-world impact followed through relationships with industry and government agencies that Purdue helped me cultivate.”
He developed the online course Quantum Detectors and Sensors, which is advancing global workforce development in quantum sensing and metrology with more than 15,000 online learners.
Jacob is an Optica Fellow and recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award and DARPA Director’s Fellowship. His work has garnered more than 15,000 citations across 125 publications, and he has an h-index of 51.