Govind P. Agrawal

Govind P. Agrawal

  • Dr. James C. Wyant Professor of Optics
  • Professor of Optics
  • Professor of Physics
  • Distinguished Scientist, Laboratory for Laser Energetics

Phd, Indian Institute of Technology

515 Goergen Hall
(585) 275-4846
gpa@optics.rochester.edu

Website


Short Biography

Govind P. Agrawal received the MS and PhD degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, in 1971 and 1974 respectively. After holding positions at the École Polytechnique, Paris; City University of New York, New York; and AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, he joined the University of Rochester in January 1989, where he is currently the James C. Wyant Professor of Optics. Dr. Agrawal is a Life fellow of IEEE, a Distinguished Fellow of Optical Society of India, and a Fellow of the Optica. He has served on the editorial boards of many journals devoted to optics and was the Editor-in-Chief of the Optica journal Advances in Optics and Photonics from January 2014 to December 2019. He chaired the Optica Publication Council in 2009 and 2010 and was also on the Optica Board of Directors during that period. Professor Agrawal received the IEEE Photonics Society’s prestigious Quantum Electronics Award in 2012. He was the recipient of 2013 William H. Riker University Award for Graduate Teaching. Dr. Agrawal was awarded the Esther Hoffman Beller Medal of the Optical Society in 2015. He was the recipient of two major awards in 2019—Max Born Award of the Optical Society and Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physics Society. Professor Agrawal received in 2020 the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Hajim School of Engineering.

Research Overview

Dr. Agrawal's research interests cover several areas of optics including nonlinear photonics, fiber optics, lasers, quantum optics, silicon photonics, and optical communications. He has authored eight books several of which are used worldwide for teaching and graduate education. His book on Fiber-Optic Communication Systems (Wiley, 5th ed. 2021) is a standard graduate textbook in many universities worldwide for training telecommunication engineers. His book on Nonlinear Fiber Optics was first published in 1989. It has helped in training a whole generation of scientists and appears among the 10 top cited books in Physics at Google. The sixth edition of this book was published in September 2019. He also coauthored with Malin Premaratne Theoretical Foundations of Nanoscale Quantum Devices (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Agrawal has also published more than 450 research papers in many internationally reputed scientific journals.

Research Interests

  • Fiber Optics
  • Lasers
  • Optical Communications