Rate My Professor Benjamin Williams

Benjamin Williams is a Professor and Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined the UCLA faculty in 2007 following a postdoctoral appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Laboratory of Electronics. Williams received his B.S. in Physics from Haverford College in 1996, earning the American Physical Society Apker Award for his undergraduate thesis on mixing in two-dimensional turbulent fluid flows. He completed his M.S. in 1998 and Ph.D. in 2003 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where his doctoral work contributed to the development of some of the first terahertz quantum cascade lasers. He is a Henry Samueli Engineering Fellow, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute, and leads the Terahertz and Infrared Photonics Group. Williams previously served as Vice Chair for Graduate Studies in his department from 2023 to 2025 and chaired the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering Faculty Executive Committee from 2015 to 2017.

Williams specializes in terahertz and mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers and photonic devices, low-dimensional semiconductor materials and intersubband physics, terahertz and infrared plasmonics, waveguides, antennas, and metasurfaces. Notable contributions from his group include broadband continuous single-mode tuning of a short-cavity quantum-cascade VECSEL and terahertz quantum cascade VECSELs with watt-level output power. Key publications are “Terahertz quantum cascade lasers” in Nature Photonics (2007), “Broadband continuous single-mode tuning of a short-cavity quantum-cascade VECSEL” in Nature Photonics (2019), “Terahertz Quantum Cascade VECSEL with Watt-Level Output Power” in Applied Physics Letters (2018), and “Metasurface quantum-cascade laser with electrically switchable polarization” in Optica (2017). He has earned the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, 2016), NSF CAREER Award (2012), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2008), IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology Best Paper Award (2013), and the 2026 Distinguished Engineering Educator Award. Williams has advised more than a dozen doctoral students and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses.