Drew Maywar - Featured Faculty 2011

Dr. Maywar oversees RIT's Photonic Systems Laboratory, a laboratory geared to investigate the generation, manipulation, transmission, and storage of data in the form of light. Drawing from industrial experience at Bell Laboratories, where he prototyped Lucent Technologies' first commercial Terabit-per-second (10¹² bits-per-second) fiber-optic communication system, he works with students to provide them with hightech laboratory experiences while advancing the state of art of light-based communications.

In 2011, Dr. Maywar coauthored seven papers published in peer-reviewed journals. These publications introduced a new concepts for clocks enabled by light-based memory and for energy-efficient structures that convert light-based data from one wavelength (or “color”) to another, revealed previously unknown spectral warping of light pulses passing through ultrafast optical amplifiers, and laid out an in-depth study of the thermal-based performance degradation of surface-emitting lasers. Much of the research presented in these publications was funded by the National Science Foundation on a project for which Dr. Maywar is Principle Investigator. This project studies the physical nature of dataencoded light pulses within communication networks and how to alter their fundamental properties such as wavelength. Dr. Maywar is also Principle Investigator for a project funded by the US Naval Air Systems Command that is focused on the design and development of fiber-optic networks for on-board data communications within aircraft. Compared to existing electrical cables, optical fibers enable networks having higher data rates, lower weight, smaller spatial footprint, higher degree of electrical isolation, and improved defense against electromagnetic interference.

Dr. Maywar is an overseas editor for the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics and has received several awards for research and education in Japan, including a Fulbright fellowship for laser research and Japanese-culture study at Osaka University's Institute of Laser Engineering and a grant from the National Science Foundation for light-based-memory research at the University of Tokyo.