Rate My Professor Bill Corcoran

Associate Professor Bill Corcoran serves in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, at Monash University. He earned his PhD in Physics from the University of Sydney in 2011, with research on light-by-light control on photonic chips and enhanced optical nonlinearities in silicon waveguides for fibre optic systems. Prior to his doctoral studies, he completed a BSci/BEng in Physics and Electronic Engineering from RMIT University. From 2011 to 2013, Corcoran held a postdoctoral position at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, investigating phase-sensitive fibre optic parametric amplification and its applications in optical communications. He joined Monash University in late 2013 as project leader for the Terabit-per-second Systems flagship within the ARC Centre for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS). In 2015, he joined the faculty in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering and established the Monash Photonic Communications Laboratory.

Corcoran's research focuses on optical communications, employing photonic technologies including optical microcombs, stimulated Brillouin scattering, optical injection locking, and nonlinear optical devices to advance high-capacity fibre systems and enable ultra-dense data transmission. As an ARC Future Fellow from 2023 to 2027, he leads the project 'Parallel Lines: Ultra-dense optical systems for extreme data-rates.' Since December 2023, he co-leads the Information and Intelligence Theme of the ARC Centre of Excellence on Optical Microcombs for Breakthrough Science (COMBS). His awards include Outstanding Research by an Early Career Researcher from Monash University Faculty of Engineering (2016), Optica Outstanding Reviewer (2019), CISRA Postgraduate Prize (2009), Dean's Prize for Outreach (2008), Postgraduate Research Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement (2009), and Wanda Henry Prize for Best Student Paper (2010). Key publications encompass 'Ultra-dense optical data transmission over standard fibre with a single chip source' (Nature Communications, 2020), 'A perspective on optical microcomb distillation: A tool to break power barriers for tiny rainbows' (Applied Physics Reviews, 2024), 'Self-Locking of Free-Running DFB Lasers to a Single Microring Resonator for Dense WDM' (2025), and 'Feedback Control in Microwave Photonic Transversal Filter Systems Based on Optical Microcombs' (2024). Corcoran is a guest editor for IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics (2022), senior member of Optica, and member of IEEE and the Australian and New Zealand Optics and Photonics Society. He supervises PhD students and participates in programming committees for conferences such as OFC (2022-2024) and OECC (2024-2025).