Welcome to the Youngblood Photonics Lab at Pitt

Our research combines unique optoelectronic materials with scalable photonic circuits to create new platforms for low-latency machine learning, reconfigurable photonic devices, and precision biosensing. Key to our work is a fundamental understanding of light-matter interaction at the nanoscale and use of advanced nanofabrication techniques to address major challenges facing these disciplines. The following areas of research in our group are: 1) Programmable Photonic Devices and Architectures for Machine Learning; 2) Waveguide-Integrated Circuits for Biosensing; and 3) Waveguide-Integrated 2D Materials for High Performance Optoelectronics.

News:

Daniel Vaz receives 2023 PQI Graduate Fellowship

Congratulations to group member Daniel Vaz who was awarded the prestigious 2023 PQI Graduate Fellowship! Daniel will be exploring exotic exitons in 2D heterostructures as part of his fellowship research activities. Read more about the award and research here Congrats, Daniel!

Nic's article published in ACS Photonics

Group member Nicholas Nobile’s article entitled “Time-Resolved Temperature Mapping Leveraging the Strong Thermo-Optic Effect in Phase-Change Materials” is published in ACS Photonics! This work demonstrates a method to experimentally validate dynamic thermal simulations of electrically-switched GST pixels. Congratulations, Nic!

YPL partners with Accipiter Systems to design high throughput optical AI accelerators

We are excited to announce the start of a collaborative DoD project with Accipiter Systems. Processing information in the photonic analog domain can enable high computational throughput through multi-dimensional parallelization in space, time, and frequency. In this two-year project, we will work with Accipiter to develop a modular photonic computing... [Read More]

YPL awarded collaborative grant with UMD to develop ultrafast and efficient phase-change photonic memory

We are excited to report the award of another collaborative NSF grant entitled, “Fast and efficient phase-change photonics using low-dimensional materials.” We will be working with our good friend Prof. Carlos Rios (UMD) who is leading this project and is a pioneer in optical phase-change materials. Our groups will be... [Read More]

YPL awarded collaborative grant with UMN for trapping and sorting viruses

Our collaborative proposal entitled, “Waveguide-Integrated Graphene Nano-tweezERs (WIGNER) for rapid sorting and analysis of nanovesicles and viruses” has been funded by NSF! Our lab will be working with co-PI Sang-Hyun Oh (UMN), an expert in trapping and sensing at the nanoscale, to develop a fully integrated optical platform for rapid... [Read More]

Funding Sources:

Our lab acknowledges generous funding support provided by: