Simar Saini

Professor Saini joined the University of Waterloo in September 2007 as an assistant professor. He received a B.Tech. (Honours) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (1996), and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park (2001). His Ph.D. thesis was on the 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 founding of a start-up company Covega Corporation where Professor Saini worked as the Lead Optoelectronics Device Engineer from December 2000 to October 2004, and as Lead Applications Engineer from October 2005 to September 2007. 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 focused on ethernet based metro area networks with less than five ms restoration time using intelligence in the optical domain. From October 2004 to September 2005, Saini completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland where he worked on biochemical sensors and optical packet routing.