Niels Quack (born 1980 in

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

) is a Swiss and German engineer specialized in optical micro engineering. He is a SNSF professor at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and director of the Photonic Micro- and Nanosystems Laboratory at its School of Engineering.

Career

Quack studied engineering at EPFL and received his Master's degree in 2005. He then joined Jürg Dual's Institute for Mechanical Systems at ETH Zurich as a PhD student and graduated in 2010 with a thesis on "Micromirrors for integrated tunable mid-infrared detectors and emitters." In 2011, he went to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Ming C. Wu's Integrated Photonics Laboratory at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. From 2014 to 2015, he was senior

microelectromechanical systems Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), also written as micro-electro-mechanical systems (or microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems) and the related micromechatronics and microsystems constitute the technology of microscopic devices, ...

engineer with Sercalo Microtechnology Inc. Since 2015, he has been an SNSF Assistant Professor with the EPFL, and head of the Photonic Micro- and Nanosystems Laboratory at its School of Engineering.

Research

The research interests of Quack's group include photonic

micro Micro may refer to: Measurement * micro- (μ), a metric prefix denoting a factor of 10−6 Places * Micro, North Carolina, town in U.S. People * DJ Micro, (born Michael Marsicano) an American trance DJ and producer *Chii Tomiya (都宮ちい ...

- and Nanosystems Engineering for integrated transducers. They focus on diamond photonics and silicon photonic

(MEMS), and photonic switches and tunable optical microsystems that find application in information and communication technologies, and emerging fields such as

quantum information Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both th ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

. Quack's research has been featured in several international news outlet's such as Inside Unmanned Systems,

Swissinfo SWI swissinfo.ch is a multilingual news and information platform produced by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRG SSR). Its content is Swiss-centred, with top priority given to in-depth information on politics, the economy, the arts, science ...

Phys.org Phys.org is an online science, research and technology news aggregator offering briefs from press releases and reports from news agencies (a form of journalism sometimes pejoratively called churnalism). The website also produces its own science jo ...

, Bilan,

Laser Focus World ''Laser Focus World'' is a monthly magazine published by Endeavor Business Media covering laser, photonics and optoelectronics technologies, applications, and markets. Many qualified professionals in those fields receive it free of charge; it is a ...

, and Enerzine. His research is also introduced in online videos such as the OSA stories and the H2020 Morphic Project.

Distinctions

Quack has been an associate editor ''Journal of Optical Microsystems'', ''Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS (JM³)'', and ''Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems.'' He has been a steering committee member of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

International Conference on Optical MEMS and Nanophotonics (OMN), and served as general chair of the

OMN 2018 and the Latsis Symposium 2019 on Diamond Photonics. He is a senior member of

, a member of

The Optical Society Optica (formerly known as The Optical Society (OSA) and before that as the Optical Society of America) is a professional society of individuals and companies with an interest in optics and photonics. It publishes journals and organizes conference ...

, and a life member of

SPIE SPIE (formerly the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, later the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology, founded in 1955. It ...

. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Paper Award by ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

Microsystems & Nanoengineerin''g 2020.

Most cited papers

* * * * * * * * * *

References

External links

* * Website of th
Laboratory of Photonic Micro- and Nanosystems
{{DEFAULTSORT:Quack, Niels Living people ETH Zurich alumni Academic staff of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne 1980 births École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne alumni 21st-century Swiss engineers