Biography

Lan Li obtained her B. S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China (2010) and Ph.D. degree from University of Delaware (2016), both in Materials Science and Engineering. Since then she has been the postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was recognized with the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad (2015) and Norbert J. Kreidl Award for Young Scholars (2016) by American Ceramic Society Glass and Optical Materials Division. Dr. Li accepted the offer as an assistant professor in Westlake University and returned to China in early 2019. Her research interest focuses on nanophotonic materials and devices, infrared optical glass materials, integrated flexible photonic device fabrication, characterization and application.

Research

Flexible integrated photonics is a new technology that has only started to burgeon in the past few years, which enables a wide cross-section of emerging applications ranging from flexible optical interconnects, broadband photonic tuning to conformal sensors on biological tissues.

Dr. Li has pioneered a monolithic approach to realize flexible, high-index-contrast glass photonics with significantly improved processing throughput and yield. She also demonstrated flexible photonic devices with record optical performance and extreme mechanical robustness, which can sustain over thousands of bending or stretching cycles by adopting the developed mechanics theory accounting for multiple neutral axes. This theory can accurately predict the strain-optical coupling behavior within the laminated structures. She further proved that the developed technology can also offer a facile fabrication route for heterogeneous integration with active components as well as 3-D photonic devices such as vertically coupled micro-resonators, adiabatic inter-layer waveguide couplers and photonic crystal. Those multilayer devices are usually difficult to process using traditional methods. The related research work has been highlighted as one of the most exciting peer-reviewed optics research by the Optical Society of America ("Optics in 2014" special issue of OSA's Optics & Photonics News).

Her future work will continue focusing on the technology development and the practical implementation of flexible integrated photonics. The research directions include but are not limited to the following:

1. Photonic integration development with novel materials such as infrared optical glass materials, biocompatible oxides, polymer, 2D materials, semiconductor membrane, etc;

2. Design, fabrication and testing of passive and active components with new functionalities;

3. Investigation and application of flexible photonic chip in the field of wearable sensing, optical interconnect, and biotechnology. 

Representative Publications

1. L. Li*, H. Lin*, S. Qiao*, Y. Zou, S. Danto, K. Richardson, J. D. Musgraves, N. Lu, and J. Hu, " Integrated Flexible Chalcogenide Glass Photonic Devices," Nat. Photonics 8 (8), 643-649 (2014)

2. L. Li*, H. Lin*, S. Qiao*, Y. Huang, J. Li, J. Michon, T. Gu, C. Ramos, L. Vivien, A.Yadav, K. Richardson, N. Lu and J. Hu, "Monolithic stretchable integrated photonics," Light: Sci. & Appl., 7, 17138 (2018).

3. L. Li*, H. Lin*, Y. Huang, R. J. Shiue,  J. Li, J. Michon , C. Smith, K. Richardson, D. Englund and J. Hu, “ High-performance flexible waveguide-integrated photodetectors,” Optica, 5, 44-51 (2018).

4. D. Li*, L. Li*, B. Jared, G. Keeler, B. Miller, M. Wood, C. Hains, W. Sweatt, S. Paap, M. Saavedra, C. Alford, J. Mudrick, U. Das, S. Hegedus, A. Tauke-Pedretti, J. Hu and T. Gu, “Wafer integrated micro-scale concentrating photovoltaics,” Prog. Photovolt: Res. Appl., 26, 651-658 (2018)

5. L. Li, P. Zhang, W. Wang, H. Lin, A. B. Zerdoum, S. J. Geiger, Y. Liu, N. Xiao, Y. Zou, O. Ogbuu, Q. Du, X. Jia, J. Li and J. Hu, “ Foldable and Cytocompatible Sol-gel TiO2 Photonics,” Sci. Rep., 5, 13832 (2015).

6. L. Li*, Y. Zou*, H. Lin, J. Hu, X. Sun, N. Feng, S. Danto, K. Richardson, T. Gu, and M. Haney, "A Fully-integrated Flexible Photonic Platform for Chip-to-chip Optical Interconnects," J. Lightwave Technol. 31, 4080-4086 (2013).

7.  L. Li, H, Lin, J. Michon, Y. Huang, J. Li, Q. Du, A. Yadav, K. Richardson, T. Gu, and J. Hu, "A new twist on glass: a brittle material enabling flexible integrated photonics," Int. J. Appl. Glass Sci. 8, 61-68 (2017).

8. L. Li, H. Lin, S. J. Geiger, A.B. Zerdoum, P. Zhang, O. Ogbuu, Q. Du, X. Jia, S. Novak, C. Smith, K. Richardson, J. D. Musgraves and J. Hu, “Amorphous thin film for mechanically flexible, multimaterial integrated photonics,” Am. Ceram. Soc. Bull. 95, 34-36 (2016).

9. J. Hu, L. Li, H. Lin, P. Zhang, W. Zhou, and Z. Ma, "Flexible integrated photonics: where materials, mechanics and optics meet," Opt. Mater. Express 3, 1313-1331 (2013)

 * These authors contributed equally