Integrated Photonics Lab Journal Covers

Dr. Yating Wan is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and the principal investigator of the Integrated Photonics Laboratory at KAUST. 

Dr. Wan specializes in silicon photonics with a focus on integrating on-chip light sources for data communication, optical computing, OPA-based lidar, and quantum information processing. 

Before joining KAUST, Dr. Wan worked in Professor John Bowers’ group at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2017–2022), where she led Intel’s project on heterogeneously integrated QD lasers on silicon. 

At KAUST, she leads a dynamic team of 20 members, including seven postdoctoral researchers, 11 Ph.D. students, and two master’s students.

Dr. Wan has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including 38 first-author papers (29 journals, 9 proceedings, and 10 journal covers) and 26 corresponding-author publications (11 journals, 15 conferences).  

For her pioneering work in on-chip laser integration on silicon, Dr. Wan has received numerous major awards, including the 2021 CLEO Tingye Li Innovation Prize (one awardee worldwide); the 2022 Rising Stars of Light recognition by Light: Science & Applications (three awardees worldwide); inclusion in MIT Technology Review’s 2023 “35 Innovators Under 35 for China”; the 2025 Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature ($250,000 prize, three awardees worldwide); and the 2025 IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award (one awardee worldwide).

Outside her immediate research focus, Dr. Wan has been an active contributor to the broader academic community. She serves as manager and column editor for the LSA Editorial Office in Thuwal, as associate editor for Applied Optics and the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics (JQE), and as guest associate editor for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics (JSTQE). 

Dr. Wan is also a technical program committee member for the International Photonics Conference (IPC) and the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) and a member of the IEEE Photonics Society Conference Council.  She has reviewed more than 100 papers for leading journals across IEEE, Optica and the Nature Publishing Group.

Dr. Yating Wan’s research focuses on advancing integrated silicon photonics through the development of efficient, scalable, and CMOS-compatible on-chip light sources based on quantum dot (QD) lasers. Her work tackles one of the central challenges in photonic integration—realizing reliable, energy-efficient light generation directly on silicon and emerging material platforms such as silicon carbide and thin-film lithium niobate. By leveraging cutting-edge heterogeneous integration techniques, her group has demonstrated QD lasers with record-low threshold currents, ultranarrow linewidths, and remarkable temperature and feedback stability.

These high-performance QD light sources unlock the full potential of silicon photonics as a universal hardware platform that unites communication, computation, and sensing. Building on this foundation, Dr. Wan’s research explores transformative applications, including photonic computing units (PCUs) for AI acceleration, ultra-efficient optical interconnects for data centers and high-performance computing, silicon photonics-integrated LiDAR for autonomous systems, and chaos-based photonic hardware for next-generation cybersecurity.

Through the seamless integration of materials science, device engineering, and system-level photonic architectures, Dr. Wan’s work bridges the gap between laboratory breakthroughs and industrial-scale deployment. Her vision is to enable an intelligent, energy-sustainable future powered by next-generation AI hardware, high-speed interconnects, and secure optical technologies built on fully integrated QD-on-silicon photonic platforms.