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Azizur Rahman

Professor, City, University of London

PHOTONICS, A KEY ENABLING TECHNOLOGY AND ITS ROLE TO ACHIEVE THE UN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

With the advent of semiconductor lasers and low-loss optical fibres in mid 60s, the progress of Photonics technology has been rapid. Photonics, as the name indicates, manipulates photon or light but much faster, similar as Electronics manipulate electrons. Photonics has made a significant impact, in the field of optical fibre links, joining all the countries and major cities by faster Tbit/sec bandwith link, made Internet almost free, thinner flat screen display for computers and mobile phones, CD and DVD for data storage, and lasers for healthcare and material processing applications. During the last EU research cycle, Horizon2020, Photonics was identified as one of the 6 Key Enabling Technologies, and expected to play a key role in shaping the technology landscape of this century.

It is important for all of us to see how we can contribute to social, economical, health or environmental issues. The UN has identified 17 key suatainable development goals (SDGs) to sustain our survibal in this planet. To tackle global warming the Paris Agreement has been signed and 130 coutries and all have agreed to net zero-carbon contribution by 2050. Most of the funding for new EU HorizonEurope will focus the role of technology to achieve these goals. I will discuss how Photonics can help to overcome some of these big challenges our civilisation is facing now.



Biography

B. M. Azizur Rahman received the BEng and M.Sc.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering with distinctions from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1976 and 1979, respectively. He also received two gold medals for being the best undergraduate and graduate students of the whole university in 1976 and 1979, respectively. In 1979, he was awarded with a Commonwealth Scholarship to study for a PhD degree in the UK and subsequently in 1982 received his PhD degree in Electronics from University College London.

In 1988, he joined City, University of London, as a lecturer, where became a full Professor in 2000. At City University, he led the research group on Photonics Modelling, specialised in the development and use of rigorous and full-vectorial numerical approaches to design, analyse and optimise a wide range of photonic devices. He has published more than 700 journal and conference papers, and his journal papers have been cited more than 9600 times with H-index of 43. He has supervised 36 students to complete their PhD degrees as their first supervisor and received more than £13 M in research grants. Prof. Rahman is Life Fellow of the IEEE, and Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the SPIE.