JQI Fellow Kartik Srinivasan has been appointed the newest National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Co-Director of JQI. He assumed the role on Sept. 8, 2025 and will be working with Jay Sau who has been the University of Maryland (UMD) Co-Director of JQI since 2022.
“The JQI is central to quantum science research at NIST and UMD,” says Srinivasan. “I look forward to helping it continue to be successful.”
Srinivasan has been a project leader at NIST since 2007 and became a JQI Fellow and NIST Fellow in 2019. In these roles, he has researched integrated photonics—a field that studies how light and its particles (photons) behave and can be manipulated in structures made on compact semiconductor chips. Much of his research has explored ways that light can interact with matter to produce unique phenomena that reveal novel physics and may lead to practical technologies for quantum computing, metrology and sensing.
In recent years, Srinivasan and his colleagues have been developing chip-scale frequency combs—devices that produce laser light at a series of evenly spaced frequencies. Frequency combs are valuable tools for precisely measuring light, and smaller versions could help miniaturize high-performance atomic clocks and improve GPS resilience. Srinivasan’s team has also been studying ways to create low-noise, chip-scale laser sources in colors that are useful for quantum information science. In 2024, he and his collaborators developed a way to generate lasers across the green-yellow-orange-red spectral region using compact devices. Low-noise lasers in these colors are generally hard to produce with compact devices, and they are useful for driving quantum transitions in many important atomic and solid-state quantum systems.
Srinivasan has been an Optica Fellow since 2018 and has received multiple awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2010, the NIST Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2021, and the NIST Samuel Wesley Stratton Award in 2022.
He is taking over the role of NIST Co-Director from JQI Fellow Gretchen Campbell, who had held the position since 2016. Campbell was recently appointed the associate vice president for quantum research and education at the University of Maryland. Sau, the UMD JQI Co-Director, expressed gratitude for Campbell’s stewardship of the institute and looks forward to working more closely with Srinivasan.
"It has been a pleasure to have worked with Gretchen as the NIST co-director of JQI,” says Sau, who is also an associate professor of physics at UMD and a member of the Condensed Matter Theory Center. “We are really excited that Kartik is able to step into the role and bring to bear his experience of exemplary collaborations within JQI."
Story by Bailey Bedford