Hey everyone, my name is Jan David Fischbach. I have studied electrical engineering 💡 at RWTH University, where I graduated with a master's degree in 2022 🎓.

I made my first contact with photonics during a voluntary internship at TU Vienna during my second semester, where I had the pleasure to witness a mind-blowing 💥 presentation by Jelena Vuckovic on inverse photonic design. Ever since I was determined to go down that very rabbit hole. Starting off with the conventional intuition-driven design of fabrication robust passive devices in my bachelor's thesis, and subsequent work at the Institute for Integrated Photonics (IPH) 🥼. At IPH I also spend some time in their cleanroom facilities dedicated to PIC fabrication 🛠️. In my masters, I started working on active graphene photonic devices (theoretically and practically), in particular, (resonant) graphene modulators in a collaboration between Black Semiconductor GmbH and the Center for Applied Micro- and Optoelectronics (AMO) 🔦.

NOTE: You can find the online version of my masters thesis here.

In the long run, I am in pursuit of an open and enabling environment for all areas of integrated photonics in academia and industry. With (computational) photonics, we have a very potent toolbox 🧰 capable to tackle a wide variety of relevant problems (communication 🛰️, sensing 🧬, compute 💿, etc.). However, I believe we can only make full use of its potential as a collaborative community 🤝.

I have been working at Black Semiconductor and since Feburary traveling after graduation. It's about time to get my hands dirty again: In October I picked up a position as a PhD candidate at TFP in Karlsruhe, Germany.