Simar Saini
Simar Saini, Director of the Pearl Sullivan Engineering IDEAs Clinic is passionated about hands-on learning and improving engineering education. Simar Saini is also an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and specializes in optics and photonics.
- Office: Engineering 5, room 4032
- Phone: 519-888-4567 ext. 35018
- Email: sssaini@uwaterloo.ca
Biography Summary
Simarjeet Saini is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He completed his doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2001 under the guidance of Professor Mario Dagenais. Professor Saini’s Ph.D. thesis was on design and development of a new platform technology for monolithic integration of photonic devices called Passive Active Resonant Coupler (PARC). The resulting technology led to the foundation of a start-up company called Covega Corporation in Jessup, Maryland. Professor Saini worked as the Lead Optoelectronics Device Engineer at Covega, and later, as a Lead Applications Engineer. He led the design and development of Covega’s single angled facet chips, semiconductor optical amplifiers and high power lasers.
In August 2004, Professor Saini co-founded Altanet Communications, a start-up company that focused on ethernet based metro area networks with less than 5 ms restoration time using intelligence in the optical domain.
Professor Saini’s research interests include: optoelectronics components for datacom and telecom, high speed optical networks, tunable mid-IR lasers, nanophotonics chem-bio sensors, and microwave photonics. He holds 5 US patents and has 5 more in various stages of application, of which 3 have already been commercialized.