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Hi, I'm a physicist who designs distributed photonic circuit devices. Distributed photonics involves a combination of holography and photonic crystals (check out a recent publication). Diffractive structures are lithographically scribed on planar waveguides providing unique spatial and spectral filtering capability for multiplexers, filters, spectral comparators and all that weird kind of stuff. Check out my employers website where we are busy "crafting light for the information age." Also see the article in LaserFocusWorld

In an earlier life, I was a professor at Columbia and Harvard Universities as well as the University of Oregon. You can check out my publications and patents if you like. Some of those publications and patents are relevant to work done at Templex Technologies, a start-up company I co-founded, which has subsequently been acquired by Intel Corporation. I am a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America and a member of IEEE and SPIE. I received a PhD in physics from Columbia University and was an undergrad at the University of Chicago.

University work is great and so is fundamental research. Most of my own work has been in fundamental research. There is a danger though. University faculty - especially in physics - have no concrete deliverables. Today, the question of whether or not they are doing great work is based solely on whether they can get other physicists "excited." Hence conferences have become multi-media. Pretty pictures. Entertainment. Little critcal thinking. It is no longer in style in our culture to engage in thoughtful constructive criticism. Unfortunately, in science critical thinking is of profound importance. Unwillingness of researchers to critically evaluate their own work and the work of their colleagues is rendering academic physics impotent.

It might be different if academic physicists had deliverables. The fact that they do not creates a tendency to become defocused and to stray onto research topics that might be compared to estimating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Compounding this problem, the funding system currently in place has no clearly defined adversarial element whose task it is to pick out weaknesses in research areas. Referees typically come from the same field as the work they evaluate so they are disinclined to negatively comment on a field as it may also impact evaluation of their own pet projects.

The ultimate aim of science is to expand the scope of human existence in terms of methods, devices, and knowledge that will open doors of opportunity in the future. More critical thinking in academic physics is needed today - or the field will wither to irrelevance.