People - Photonic Microsystems Group

Associate Professor
mwatts-at-mit-dot-edu
Room 26-343

RLE Bio | Google Scholar

Professor Michael R. Watts is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and a member of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University in 1996. He then joined Draper Laboratory as a Member of Technical Staff in their Fiber Optics Group. In 1999 he became a Draper Fellow and received his SM and PhD degrees from MIT in 2001 and 2005, respectively. In 2005 he joined Sandia National Labs where he led their silicon photonics effort as a Principal Member of Technical Staff. In 2010 he returned to MIT as an Associate Professor.

Professor Watts' research focuses on photonic microsystems for low-power communications, sensing, and microwave-photonics applications. His current interests include the modeling, fabrication, and testing of large-scale implementations of microphotonic circuits, systems, and networks that are being integrated, directly or through hybrid techniques, with CMOS electronics for high-speed transmitting, switching, and routing applications of digital signals. Additional interests include large-scale microphotonic sensing and imaging arrays, along with optical phased arrays, nanophotonic antennas, nonlinear optics, and manipulations of optical-electromagnetic fields on-chip.