Bhavin Shastri

Bhavin J. Shastri is a Canada Research Chair in Neuromorphic Photonic Computing, an Assistant Professor of Engineering Physics at Queen's University, Canada, a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute, Canada, and a Visiting Faculty at Princeton University. He earned his Honours B.Eng. (with distinction), M.Eng., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering (photonics) from McGill University, Canada, in 2005, 2007, and 2012, respectively. He was an NSERC and Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2012-2016) and an Associate Research Scholar (2016-2018) at Princeton University. With research interests in nanophotonics, photonic integrated circuits, neuromorphic and photonic computing, and quantum neural networks, he has published more than 100 journal articles, 125 conference proceedings, seven book chapters, and given over 100 invited talks and lectures, including eight keynotes. He is a co-author of the book Neuromorphic Photonics (Taylor & Francis, 2017), a term he coined with Prof. Paul Prucnal (Princeton).

Dr. Shastri is the Scientific Co-Director of NUCLEUS, a pan-Canadian photonic computing program (funded by NSERC CREATE) bridging artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information. He received the 2022 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award and the 2020 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics "for his pioneering contributions to neuromorphic photonics" from the ICO. He is a Senior Member of Optica and IEEE, a recipient of the 2014 Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Government of Canada, the 2012 D. W. Ambridge Prize for the top graduating Ph.D. student at McGill, an IEEE Photonics Society 2011 Graduate Student Fellowship, a 2011 NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship, a 2011 SPIE Scholarship in Optics and Photonics, a 2008 NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship, and the Best Student Paper Awards at the 2014 IEEE Photonics Conference, 2010 IEEE Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, the 2004 IEEE Computer Society Lance Stafford Larson Outstanding Student Award, and the 2003 IEEE Canada Life Member Award.