About

Volkan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He works in the Caltech High-Speed Integrated Circuits (CHIC) Lab advised by Prof. Ali Hajimiri. His research focuses on large-scale photonic-electronic integrated circuits for quantum information science and high-performance computing.

His research goal is to study the fundamental physical limits of technologies (e.g. Landauer, Bekenstein, Holevo limits) and build technologies that operate at those limits. To that end, he invented various technologies that push current devices to these limits by leveraging concepts from fundamental physics. One example is quantum phased arrays that demonstrated the first free-space sensor and transceiver that can operate at the Heisenberg limit (overcoming the standard quantum limit) using quantum light and the first free-space interface for quantum information. He also invented quantum coherent transceivers that can operate at the Holevo limit (overcoming the Shannon limit) and put together a roadmap to couple these transceivers with efficient processors to push computing to the Landauer limit.

He was a recipient of 20 honors and awards, among which are the Carver Mead New Adventures Fund, Broadcom Innovation Fund, R. David Middlebrook Fellowship, Tau Beta Pi Fellowship, Roger P. Webb ECE Undergraduate Research Award, IEEE MTT-S Undergraduate/Pre-Graduate Scholarship, European Union Contest for Young Scientists CERN Special Donated Prize, and First Prize in Physics in the Turkish National Research Projects Contest. He has been a reviewer for Nature, Optica, and various IEEE journals. He is a member of the IEEE, APS, Optica, SPIE, IEEE-HKN, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Xi.

• Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, 2026 (Expected).
• M.S. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, 2022.
• B.S. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States, 2020.