Michael Hochberg

Michael Hochberg (born 1980) is an American physicist. He is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, materials science and chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Delaware and a visiting professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore. He is also the director of OpSIS. Hochberg was born in Ithaca, NY, and attended high school at the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts. He obtained a BS in Physics in 2002 and a PhD in Applied Physics in 2006, both from the California Institute of Technology. Hochberg was a student of Professor Axel Scherer.

While an undergraduate, Hochberg founded a software company, Simulant, which sold a distributed implementation of the finite-difference time-domain algorithm. Simulant was later acquired by Luxtera, a photonics component firm co-founded by Hochberg.

Hochberg's research interests include silicon photonics, nonlinear optics, and ultra-low drive voltage optical modulators. He was on the team that first demonstrated that slot waveguides could be combined with electrooptic polymers to obtain exceptionally low drive voltage modulators. Recently, he has demonstrated that this technique can be used to create modulators with drive voltages of 0.25 V, over an order-of-magnitude lower value than what is typically achieved with Lithium niobate based optical modulators. More recently, Dr. Hochberg has been involved in a demonstration that the force of an optical mode in a waveguide could be used to directly actuate a nanomechanical system. Hochberg was awarded the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator award in 2007, and was awarded a PECASE award in 2009. Hochberg's work has been featured in Nature Materials, Nature, and other journals.