JQI Fellow Mohammad Hafezi was announced as a recipient of a 2015 ONR Young Investigator award. ONR's website describes the program as being designed to promote the professional development of early-career academic scientists – called investigators, or YIPs – both as researchers and instructors. For awardees, the funding supports laboratory equipment, graduate student stipends and scholarships, and other expenses critical to ongoing and planned investigational studies.
“These recipients demonstrate the type of visionary, multidisciplinary thought that helps the U.S. Navy anticipate and adapt to a dynamic battlespace,” said Dr. Larry Schuette, ONR’s director of research. “The breadth of their research and combined value of awards underscore the significance the Navy places on ingenuity, wherever it’s harbored, and support the framework for a Naval Innovation Network built on people, ideas and information.”
Hafezi's research, with regards to this award, will focus on novel regimes of optical transport in nanostructures. He is interested in creating devices that are inherently robust for on-chip transmission and manipulation of light, with built-in protection against fabrication defects and disorders. Novel states of light could provide new approaches to metrology and key insights into non-equilibrium quantum systems. They may also have potential applications in quantum communications and sensing, both of which are central to many ONR goals.