POET Technologies Inc., the designer and developer of the POET Optical Interposer and Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for the data center and tele-communication markets, today announced that it has appointed Michal Lipson, a pioneer and thought leader in silicon photonics as well as a highly-published researcher in physics, as an advisor to the Company’s Board of Directors. The Company also plans to nominate Lipson as a director at its upcoming Annual General Meeting currently scheduled for October 6, 2022.
“We are honored to have Michal Lipson serve as an advisor to our Board in advance of her planned director nomination at the AGM,” said Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman and Chief Executive of POET. “Michal is a pioneer of silicon photonics, president-elect of the Optical society of America, MacArthur Fellow, member of the National Academy of Science, founder of three startups, and inventor of 45+ U.S. patents on transformative photonic technologies. Her impressive track record and highly regarded opinion in the field of optics and photonics will be invaluable to POET and our Board, and we look forward to leveraging her perspective, guidance and expertise. As mentioned in a recent release, we will be proposing to shareholders at the upcoming AGM an increase in the size of the Board and appointment of both Michal and Theresa Lan Ende.”
Lipson currently serves as a Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Applied Physics at Columbia University. Her research focus is on Nanophotonics and includes the investigation of novel phenomena, as well as the development of novel devices and applications. Prof. Lipson pioneered critical building blocks in the field of Silicon Photonics, which today is recognized as one of the most promising directions for solving the major bottlenecks in microelectronics. She is the inventor of over 45 issued patents and has co-authored more than 250 scientific publications. In recognition of her work in silicon photonics, she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was also awarded the NAS Comstock Prize in Physics, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Blavatnik Award, the Optical Society’s R. W. Wood Prize, the IEEE Photonics Award, and has received an honorary degree from Trinity College, University of Dublin. In 2020, she was elected the 2021 Vice President of The Optical Society and will serve as OSA President in 2023. Since 2014, every year, she has been named by Thomson Reuters as a top 1% highly cited researcher in the field of Physics.
Lipson’s work has been cited in top high-impact journals such as Nature, Nature Photonics, Nature Physics, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, Nanoletters, Lab on a Chip, Physical Review Letters and IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technologies. Today more than one thousand papers published yearly involve devices and circuits based on Lipson’s original modulators or based on other silicon photonics devices demonstrated by her group, including slot waveguides.