Ben Gellaerts and Arié Nacar Receive FWO PhD Fellowship to Pursue Their Research at VUB B-PHOT

Ben Gellaerts and Arié Nacar, alumni of our MSc in Photonics Engineering, both received a Fundamental Research Fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). Their research focuses respectively on spiking behavior in multi-wavelength lasers and on astrophotonics applications enabled by two-photon polymerization direct laser writing and liquid crystals.

Ben will study the dynamics of novel multi-wavelength lasers implemented on photonic ICs, under supervision of Martin Virte & Pablo Marin-Palomo, and explore how optical injection can trigger excitable behaviour, aka spiking. He will then investigate how multi-wavelength spiking could be beneficial for applications such as neuro-morphic computing applications.

Arié will develop ultracompact 3D-printed photonic lanterns with integrated adaptive optics based on liquid crystals technology, under the supervision of Jürgen Van Erps & Tigran Baghdasaryan. He will explore the mitigation of atmospheric turbulence using these novel components in the context of space-to-ground free-space optical communications.

We congratulate Ben and Arié for these outstanding achievements and look forward to the exciting developments their research will bring!