Daniel Blumenthal

Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

805-893-4168

danb [at] ece [dot] ucsb [dot] edu

Institute Role
Member of Electronics & Photonics Solutions Group

Research
Daniel Blumenthal’s research interests are in optical communications, photonic packet switching and all-optical networks, all-optical wavelength conversion and regeneration, ultra-fast communications, InP (indium phosphide) Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICS) and nanophotonic device technologies. In addition to his research in energy-efficient photonics for communications, he directs the LASOR (Label-Switched Optical Router) Project, which aims to move more network router processing into the optical domain, thereby saving power and reducing the necessity of costly high-speed electronics.

Biography
Daniel Blumenthal received a B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Rochester (1981), an M.S.E.E. degree from Columbia University (1988), and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1993). From 1993 to 1997 he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, Blumenthal directs the LASOR Center, a project funded by the DARPA/MTO Data in the Optical Domain Network program. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for National LambdaRail and on the Internet2 Architecture Advisory Council. He is a co-founder of Calient Networks (established 1999) and, more recently, Packet Photonics, LLC.

A Fellow of the IEEE and the Optical Society of America, Blumenthal is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (1999), a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award (1994), and an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award (1997). He has served as an Associate Editor or Guest Editor for numerous publications including IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE Transactions on Communications, and the JSTQE Special Issue on Ultra-Fast Integrated Photonics. Blumenthal served as the General Program Chair for the 2001 OSA Topical Meeting on Photonics in Switching and as Program Chair for the 1999 Meeting on Photonics in Switching. He has also served on numerous other technical program committees. He has authored or co-authored over 300 papers, holds 7 patents and is co-author of Tunable Laser Diodes and Related Optical Sources (New York: IEEE–Wiley, 2005).

For more information on Daniel Blumenthal, check out his video and presentation entitled "The UCSB Terabit Optical Ethernet Center (TOEC) and the Greening of Photonic Technologies" here.