{"id":230,"date":"2020-12-08T18:47:59","date_gmt":"2020-12-08T18:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.ucdavis.edu\/islam-new\/?page_id=230"},"modified":"2025-10-06T23:17:01","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T06:17:01","slug":"biography","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/faculty.engineering.ucdavis.edu\/islam\/biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Professor Saif Islam received his B.Sc. Degree in Physics from Middle East Technical University (1994, Turkey), an M.Sc. degree in Physics from Bilkent University (1996, Turkey), an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1999, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2001, both from UCLA. He worked for the Optical Networking Research group of JDS Uniphase Corporation and the Quantum Science Research group of the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories during 2001-04. In 2004, he joined the University of California \u2013 Davis, where he is now a Professor and the Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He served as the Director of the Northern California Nanotechnology Center during 2012-15 and served as the Vice-Chair of the <\/span>Electrical and Computer Engineering department <\/span>during 2011-13<\/span>. During 2022-25, he served as director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS<\/a>) and the Banatao Institute at UC Davis. Prof. Islam co-founded two start-up companies based on his inventions with the support of UC Davis, the University of California Office of the President, and the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization (NIREC).<\/span><\/p>\n

Professor Islam\u2019s nanoengineering research advances semiconductor electronics and ultra-fast optoelectronics by integrating low-dimensional and nanostructured materials with conventional CMOS integrated circuits (ICs). His group develops scalable, cost-effective nanofabrication methods for reproducibly manufacturing novel nanodevice arrays, surpassing traditional, sequential approaches. These innovations enable applications in silicon photonics, sensing-on-a-chip, hardware security, high-speed communication, energy harvesting systems, and ultrasensitive nanosensors. His work also explores AI-fusion in devices to enhance quantum sensing, disease detection, computational imaging, and machine vision.
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Prof. Islam has authored and co-authored more than 250 scientific papers, organized 33 scientific conferences and symposiums as a chair\/co-chair sponsored by MRS, SPIE, and IEEE, and holds 43 US and international patents<\/a> as an inventor\/co-inventor. He received the NSF Faculty Early Career Award; Outstanding Junior, Outstanding<\/span> <\/span>Mid-Career Research and <\/span>Outstanding Senior Research Faculty Awards of the College of Engineering; <\/span>IEEE Professor of the Year, and the University of California \u2013 Davis Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award- the highest teaching honor the University of California-Davis bestows on its faculties. Dr. Islam has served as a Senior Editor of IEEE Access and Associate Editors for IEEE Photonics Journal and IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology. <\/span><\/p>\n

Prof. Islam is an elected fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (<\/span>AAAS<\/a>), Optical Society (<\/span>Optica<\/a>), International Society for Optics and Photonics (<\/span>SPIE<\/a>), and the National Academy of Inventors (<\/span>NAI<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Link to CV<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Education<\/h3>\n