Ali Adibi has been appointed as the Joseph M. Pettit Professor in Electronics, effective March 1. He has been a member of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty since 2000.

Dr. Adibi leads the Photonics Research Group and advises two postdoctoral scholars and 16 Ph.D. students. One of the most highly ranked instructors in ECE, Dr. Adibi has won multiple awards at Georgia Tech for advising students and for his outstanding classroom teaching. He is also a two-time recipient of the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, an honor determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class, and he will receive the 2013 Georgia Tech Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award on April 10 at the Georgia Tech Faculty Staff Honors Luncheon.

As the leader of several multi-investigator research programs, Dr. Adibi has extensive experience in the design, optimization, simulation, and fabrication of integrated photonic structures for optical sensing, optical communications, and optical signal processing. His group has demonstrated multiple photonic structures, especially resonators and spectrometers, with world-record performance. He has published more than 120 journal papers and more than 350 conference papers.

Dr. Adibi and his Ph.D. students have also started two companies–Prospect Photonics and Sinoora–that are part of Georgia Tech VentureLab. Prospect Photonics is developing a spectrometer for lab, in-line diagnostic, and portable sensor applications, and Sinoora is building a spectroscopy platform that will have applications in a broad range of areas including biochemistry, medicine, pharmaceuticals, industrial quality assurance, homeland security, mineralogy, and environmental sciences.

Within the last two years, Dr. Adibi has been elected as a Fellow of SPIE, OSA, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has also received several of the nation’s most prestigious technical accolades such as the Packard Fellowship, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).