Always patient, kind, and understanding.
Aaron Danner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering within the College of Design and Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He holds positions as Deputy Director of the Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning (CDTL) and Associate Head of Undergraduate Programmes. Danner leads the Optical Device Research Group, focusing on optics and photonics hardware, particularly chip-based integrated optics using lithium niobate and barium titanate to enhance light-matter interactions. His research targets applications in optical communications, arbitrary optical wavefront generation and detection, quantum information processing, holography, and optical computing such as Ising machines.
He obtained a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his thesis addressed vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers operating in photonic crystal waveguide defect modes. Before academia, Danner worked at Agilent Technologies (subsequently Avago Technologies and Broadcom) on efficient LED structures and vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), and served as a visiting researcher at the Microsystem Research Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology. At NUS, his group has been awarded a $7 million Competitive Research Project from Singapore's National Research Foundation for research on Ising computers and optical Ising machines. He supervises the NUS Solar Powered Helicopter Team and contributes to the Spin and Energy Lab as co-supervisor and SERIS as adjunct researcher. Danner's notable publications include "Visible-frequency metasurface for structuring and spatially multiplexing optical vortices" (2016), "Advances in lithium niobate photonics: development status and perspectives" (2022), "A Barium Titanate-on-Oxide Insulator Optoelectronics Platform" (Advanced Materials, 2021), and "A practical superhydrophilic self cleaning and antireflective surface for outdoor photovoltaic applications" (2012). His work has garnered over 6,700 citations on Google Scholar. In 2025, he played a key role in establishing the SPIE-CDE Fellowship in Optical Science and Engineering, supported by a US$500,000 endowment. His students and group members have received multiple awards, including Best Paper at IEEE CEC 2025 and Best Poster at the Lithium Niobate Photonics Conference 2025.
NUS researchers unveil passive all-optical nonlinear neuron using PPLN waveguides in eLight, enabling scalable photonic AI with 80% efficiency and fs speeds. Explore the breakthrough, implications, and Singapore's photonics future.
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