Keren Bergman

Keren Bergman is an American electrical engineer who is the Charles Batchelor Professor at Columbia University. She also serves as the director of the Lightwave Research Laboratory, a silicon photonics research group at Columbia University. Her research focuses on nano-photonics and particularly optical interconnects for low power, high bandwidth computing applications.

Bergman was an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton from 1994 to 2000.

Bergman went to Columbia as an associate professor of electrical engineering in 2001 and became director of its Lightwave Research Laboratory in 2002. As director of the Lightwave Research Laboratory she leads multiple research programs on optical interconnection networks for advanced computing systems, data centers, optical packet-switched routers, and chip multiprocessor nanophotonic networks-on-chip. In 2019 a team led by Bergman won a $4.8 million DARPA grant to support the development of a new class of on-chip optical interconnects that scale performance without increasing energy costs.

Returning to the lab in July 2020, after a hiatus caused by COVID-19, Bergman told Columbia Engineering News that her team used the break to find new ways to do informal interactions as well as remote data analysis.

Awards and honors In 2003 she was named a Fellow of The Optical Society "for seminal contributions to quantum noise reduction and soliton pulse generation".

She was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2009 "for contributions to development of optical interconnection and transport networks".

Bergman also won the 2016 IEEE Photonics Society Engineering Achievement Award "or pioneering contributions to optical interconnection networks and photonic-enabled architectures that advance communications and computing systems."

Selected publications

Biberman, A., Sasikanth Manipatruni, Ophir, N., Chen, L., Lipson, M. and Bergman, K., 2010. First demonstration of long-haul transmission using silicon microring modulators. Optics express, 18(15), pp. 15544-15552.