Self-driving lab discovers principles for steering spontaneous emission from metasurfaces
invited at SPIE Photonics West 2026 - Active Metasurface Devices, San Francisco,
CV
Overview
Senior Member of Technical Staff at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque NM. Research expertise spans autonomous scientific discovery, reconfigurable nanophotonics and quantum optics with a strong background in optoelectronic design, applied machine-learning and nano-fabrication.
Education
- Ph.D. Electrical & Computer Engineering (Electronics and Photonics), University of California – Santa Barbara, Mar 2018
- M.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering (Electronics and Photonics), University of California – Santa Barbara, Apr 2014
- B.Tech. Materials & Metallurgical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Jul 2012
Professional Experience
Senior Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque NM — Nov 2020 – Present
• Principal Investigator on projects in scientific-ML, quantum optics and reconfigurable metasurfaces.
• Affiliate Scientist, CINT; lead a group of 3 post-docs and collaborate with ~10 staff scientists.Technical Advisor, Neurophos & Lumotive — May 2021 – Jun 2022
• Guided productisation of reconfigurable metasurfaces for optical computing (Neurophos).
• Supported design of beam-steering liquid-crystal metasurfaces for LiDARs (Lumotive).Senior LiDAR Systems Engineer, Lumotive, Seattle WA — Apr 2018 – Oct 2020
• Led design of beam-steering metasurfaces using CMOS and LCOS platforms.
• Architected LiDAR link-budget and read-out electronics; developed denoising algorithms for point-cloud data.
Selected Publications
- Sub-picosecond steering of ultrafast incoherent emission from semiconductor metasurfaces (Nature Photonics, 2023) – Demonstrated dynamic steering of 140 fs incoherent light pulses over 70° field-of-view using InAs quantum-dot GaAs metasurfaces.
- Unidirectional photoluminescence from InGaN/GaN quantum-well metasurfaces (Nature Photonics, 2020) – Engineered the photonic density-of-states to direct emission over 10°–80° via dielectric metasurfaces embedding quantum wells.
- AutoSciLab: A Self-Driving Laboratory for Interpretable Scientific Discovery (AAAI, 2025) – Developed a machine-learning framework that autonomously drives experiments to obtain human-interpretable discoveries; ranked within the top 5 % of 13 000 submissions.
- Control of quantized spontaneous emission from single GaAs quantum dots embedded in Huygens metasurfaces (Nano Letters, 2024) – Achieved position-independent single-photon emission from isolated GaAs QDs in AlGaAs metasurfaces.
Invited Talks
AutoSciLab: A Self-Driving Laboratory For Interpretable Scientific Discovery
conference at Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
Dielectric Metasurface for Broadband Excitonic State Control in GaAs Quantum Dots
conference at Laser Science, LM5F.3,
Enhancement of non-classical radiation from quantum dots embedded within semiconductor Huygens’ metasurfaces
conference at CLEO: Fundamental Science,
Self-driving lab discovers high-efficiency directional incoherent emission from reconfigurable semiconductor metasurfaces
conference at Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO),
Machine learning discovers parsimonious equations governing incoherent emission steering from semiconductor metasurfaces
conference at CLEO: Fundamental Science,
Ultrafast non-reciprocal spin resonances in frustrated plasmonic metasurfaces
at 2024 Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics CLEO 2024,
Time Domain Phase Engineering of Metasurfaces Enables Passive Ultrafast Photonic Streaking
at 2024 Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics CLEO 2024,
Self-driving lab discovers high-efficiency directional incoherent emission from reconfigurable semiconductor metasurfaces
at CLEO Fundamental Science CLEO Fs 2024 in Proceedings CLEO 2024 Part of Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics,
Enhancing semiconductor quantum dot emission with electric and magnetic dipole modes in Mie metasurfaces
conference at Metamaterials, Metadevices, and Metasystems 2023,
Learning Incoherent Light Emission Steering From Metasurfaces Using Generative Models
conference at Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV),
Ultrafast reconfigurability of circular dichroism from bound-states-in-the-continuum metasurfaces
at CLEO Fundamental Science CLEO Fs 2023,
Photoconductive Metasurfaces for Near-Field Terahertz Sources and Detectors
at Proceedings of SPIE the International Society for Optical Engineering,
InAs based Nonlinear Dielectric Metasurface for Binary Phase Terahertz Generation
at CLEO Science and Innovations CLEO S and I 2023,
Ultrafast beam steering of photoluminescence from dielectric metasurfaces
at Optics Infobase Conference Papers,
Cascaded Second Order Optical Nonlinearities in a Dielectric Metasurface
at Optics Infobase Conference Papers,
Unidirectional luminescence from InGaN/GaN quantum-well metasurfaces
at Optics Infobase Conference Papers,
Tunable and reconfigurable high-index semiconductor meta-optics
at Proceedings of SPIE the International Society for Optical Engineering,
Light-emitting metasurfaces: A metalens approach for focusing spontaneous emission
at Optics Infobase Conference Papers,
Topological Dirac semi-metals: a dynamic platform for tunable optical metasurfaces (Conference Presentation)
at Optical Components and Materials XVI,
Tunable Metasurface based on Silicon Doped Indium Oxide
at Optics Infobase Conference Papers,
Reconfigurable semiconductor Mie-resonant meta-optics
at Proceedings of SPIE the International Society for Optical Engineering,
Electrically Switchable Infrared Nanophotonic Devices with VO<inf>2</inf>
at 2018 76th Device Research Conference (DRC),
Reconfigurable Mie resonators embedded in a tunable ENZ cavity (Conference Presentation)
at Metamaterials, Metadevices, and Metasystems 2017,
Widely tunable infrared semiconductor Mie resonators(Conference Presentation)
at Metamaterials, Metadevices, and Metasystems 2016,
Properties of infrared doped semiconductor Mie resonators (Presentation Recording)
at Metamaterials, Metadevices, and Metasystems 2015,
Dynamically reconfigurable metasurfaces (Presentation Recording)
at Metamaterials, Metadevices, and Metasystems 2015,
Teaching & Mentoring
Skills
- Nanofabrication (III–V, liquid-crystal metasurfaces)
- Ultrafast and quantum-optical characterisation
- Scientific Machine Learning & autonomous experimentation
- Optoelectronic and LiDAR system design