IEE Director John E. Bowers Receives 2021 IPRM Award

Professor John E. Bowers receives the 2021 IPRM¹ Award for his contribution to the development of III-V/Si photonics and heterogeneous integration techniques with the pioneering demonstration of hybrid indium phosphide/Si laser.

John E. Bowers is the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology and is the Director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Bowers received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University and worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories and Honeywell before joining UC Santa Barbara. 

Professor Boers has made numerous contributions to the development of III-V/Si photonics and heterogeneous integration techniques. He demonstrated first hybrid indium phosphide/Si laser in 2006 by using direct bonding of InP-based active layer onto Si photonics wafer. This groundbreaking technology has become a very important technology to support the increase of transmission capacity and the reduction of cost and energy. He also developed quantum dot lasers epitaxially grown on Si, which is the ultimate laser fabrication technology that researchers in this field have been working on for a long time. Professor Bowers has received numerous awards including the IEEE Photonics Award, OSA/IEEE Tyndall Award, the IEEE LEOS William Streifer Award and the South Coast Business and Technology Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors, a Fellow of the IEEE, Optical Society of America (OSA) and the American Physical Society.

¹ International Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials