Bhavin J. Shastri

Bhavin J. Shastri (born 1981) is a Kenyan-Canadian academic of Indian origin, specializing in nanophotonics, photonic integrated circuits, and neuromorphic computing. He holds the Canada Research Chair in neuromorphic photonic computing and is a faculty member in Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy at Queen's University at Kingston.

Shastri is a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada and holds a cross-appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen's University. He also serves as the co-director of NUCLEUS, a pan-Canadian photonic computing program funded by NSERC CREATE.

Early life and education Bhavin J. Shastri was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1981. He attended McGill University, where he earned a B.Eng. with distinction in electrical engineering in 2005, followed by an M.Eng. in 2007, and a Ph.D. in 2012, all specializing in photonics.

Career From 2014 to 2016, Shastri was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow and from 2012 to 2014 he was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, where he worked under the guidance of Paul Prucnal. He then served as an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton from May 2016 to June 2018 and continues to serve as a Visiting Research Collaborator since July 2018.

In 2024, Shastri was appointed as the scientific co-director of the NUCLEUS CREATE Program under NSERC.

Research Shastri is recognized as a pioneer in the field of neuromorphic photonics, a term he co-coined.

In 2024, Shastri and his team developed an optical neural network (ONN) that isolates specific transmissions and identifies signals in real time with a processing delay of less than 15 picoseconds. The ONN also operates at significantly lower power consumption than comparable electronic systems. In the same year, Shastri and his collaborators demonstrated a photonic tensor core capable of performing over 120 billion operations per second and supporting in situ neural network training with weight updates at 60 GHz.

Selected publications

Books P. R. Prucnal and B. J. Shastri, Neuromorphic Photonics, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton, Florida (2017).

Selected awards and recognition 2020: IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics 2022: SPIE Early Career Achievement Award 2022: iCANX Young Scientist Award 2024: Science News (SN) 10 Scientist to Watch 2024: Member of the College, the Royal Society of Canada 2024: Canada Research Chair in Neuromorphic Photonic Computing 2025: Sloan Research Fellowship