ECE Assistant Professor Yuan Is at the Oakland Campus and Is Part of the Institute for NanoSI
Assistant Professor Yuan Yuan joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in January 2025. He is based at the Oakland, California campus and his research focuses on optoelectronic devices, single-photon detection, silicon photonics, and large-scale photonic integrated circuits. He is part of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation at Northeastern.
Yuan Yuan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, joined the College of Engineering in January 2025. He is based at the Oakland, California, campus. His research focuses on optoelectronic devices, single-photon detection, silicon photonics, and large-scale photonic integrated circuits for interconnects and computing.
The former senior research scientist at Hewlett Packard Labs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is a member of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation at Northeastern. NanoSI is the university’s first bicoastal research institute. Located in Boston and in Oakland, it is focused on semiconductor education, research, and entrepreneurship.
Yuan says it’s the next logical step for someone who became enthralled by research during his graduate years at the University of Virginia, where he joined a warm and productive research group, and has been dedicated to research since.
Growing up, he excelled in physics, and focused on electrical engineering in college. He continued onto graduate school where he first learned about photonics, and he was captivated. “I reached out to a respected professor and asked if I could work in his lab,” Yuan says. “I found out that I am more the research type and aspire to be a mentor like him.”
Another class in optical electronics further deepened his passion, revealing that “innovative designs and new materials can fundamentally transform circuits,” Yuan says. “That’s why I am so interested in it.”
Upon completing his education in China, Yuan enrolled in a PhD program specializing in photonics at the University of Virginia, where he graduated in 2019. He began as a summer intern at Hewlett Packard Labs, working his way up to his senior research scientist role with a focus on silicon photonics.
After five years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, he decided to pursue research work in academia, with a plan to collaborate with researchers from a range of different disciplines.
To Yuan, collaboration is critical to successful research and it was a factor in his decision to join Northeastern. He considered several job opportunities, but Northeastern was “beyond my expectations,” he says.
“I wanted to join a university where people foster strong relationships and support each other,” he adds. “I saw firsthand how closely the faculty collaborate.”
His focus on collaboration extends more broadly to the photonics industry and he invests time in producing research papers. He has authored and co-authored over 80 journal and conference papers, including in Nature Photonics and Nature Communications, and holds nine patents. His work has been recognized by the Best Paper Award in Industry Innovation at the Asian Communications and Photonics (ACP) conference 2021 and the Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference (OECC) 2023.
He serves on the Technical Program Committee of several international conferences and is a member of IEEE Photonics Society Publications Council, where he is a representative of the Young Professionals Advisory Committee. Yuan says published research can be a form of collaboration for independent researchers. Published work can help validate a researcher’s direction or indicate a different approach is needed.
“I think an individual’s research efforts can be limited, and other people’s research can inspire them,” Yuan says.
He is looking forward to working with new colleagues at Northeastern as he continues his research on photonic integrated circuits, which can impact many applications. These circuits are particularly suited for AI, which has significant processing and transmission demands.
“The basic idea with photonics is the same as what we’ve seen in the microelectronics industry,” Yuan says, referring to the development of significantly smaller and more powerful chips. “We aim to integrate all the photonic components onto a single chip so you can do many different functions with it.”