Thomas Van Vaerenbergh

Thomas Van Vaerenbergh received the master's degree in applied physics and the Ph.D. degree in photonics from Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, in 2010 and 2014, respectively. He was awarded the scientific prize Alcatel-Lucent Bell/FWO for his PhD thesis on all-optical spiking neurons in silicon photonics. In 2014, he joined the Large-Scale Integrated Photonics team in Hewlett Packard Labs, part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), in Palo Alto, California. Since 2019, he is based in HPE Belgium and has been expanding HPE’s research activities related to photonics and AI in the EMEA region. His main research interests include analog photonic and electronic accelerators for combinatorial optimization and AI workloads, and inverse design of photonic devices and circuits based on physics-informed machine learning. His is (co-)PI of 4 EU projects related to neuromorphic photonics (NEUROPULS, GATEPOST, SPIKEPro and Q-ONE) and one DARPA-funded project (QuICC) related to optimization accelerators based on analog electronics.

For JLT, he is handling submissions on the following topics:

• Optical Computing
• Silicon Photonics
• Inverse Design