Event
MSE Seminar: Dr. Carlos Ríos Ocampo, UMD
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
3:30 p.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Sherri Tatum
301-405-5240
statum12@umd.edu
Making Photonics Programmable: Materials, Devices, and Scalable Applications
Abstract: The Photonic Materials & Devices Lab at the University of Maryland studies nanoscale light–matter interactions and translates nanomaterial functionality into high-performance, reconfigurable optoelectronic devices and systems. By integrating materials science, nanofabrication, and integrated photonics, we link structure–property relationships to device performance, with applications in data processing, imaging, sensing, and computing. As the lab marks its fifth year (founded in 2021), this talk highlights key projects, milestones, and lessons learned, and outlines emerging opportunities.
Our work is enabled by an end-to-end workflow spanning materials synthesis, multiphysics modeling, chip layout, nanofabrication, and broadband optoelectronic characterization from the visible to the near‑infrared. Three research thrusts will be emphasized: (1) Phase-change photonics, where chalcogenide phase-change materials enable nonvolatile, multilevel control of optical phase and amplitude through reversible amorphous–crystalline transitions, supporting compact devices with zero-hold power for programmable modulation and in-memory photonic computing. (2) Optical materials and metamaterials, where we engineer materials with targeted properties (e.g., epsilon-near-zero behavior) and integrate them into structures to achieve unusual electromagnetic responses for filtering, imaging, and emerging wave-physics functionalities. (3) Photonic integrated circuits, where we design, fabricate (in-house and via foundries), and test PICs for applications including on-chip Fourier-transform spectrometers, telecom subsystems such as analog-to-digital converters, and more.
Bio: Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has led the Photonic Materials & Devices group since 2021. He was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT (USA), earned a DPhil from the University of Oxford (UK), an MSc in Optics and Photonics from the KIT (Germany), and a BSc in Physics from the University of Antioquia (Colombia). Carlos’s scientific interests focus on studying and developing innovative chip-scale technologies driven by nanomaterials and photonics. He has extensively researched and pioneered chalcogenide phase-change materials for nonvolatile, reconfigurable nanophotonics and photonic computing. He was awarded the NSF CAREER Award in 2026, the Young Scientist Award in Optics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) in 2023, and was named one of the Rising Stars of Light in 2021 by the journal Light: Science & Applications.
