Draft:Harish Bhaskaran

Harish Bhaskaran is a British-Indian engineer and currently Professor of Applied Nanomaterials at Oxford University. He is also the Associate Head (Research) for the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at Oxford. He is known for his research and achievements in the field of nanoscale technology, including photonic or neuromorphic computing and displays. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2023 for "his research achievements in engineering nanoscale devices including breakthrough photonic or neuromorphic computing and displays". He is also a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and a Chartered Engineer.

Education
He obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Civil Engineering from the College of Engineering Pune. He obtained a MS in Mechanical Engineering carrying out research on packaging of MEMS systems at the University of Maryland College Park. Subsequently, he joined the laboratory of Keith Schwab, carrying out research within the Quantum Computing Group on Nanoelectromechanical Systems obtaining a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (co-advised by Peter Sandborn) from the same University.

Career
After his PhD, Bhaskaran spent three years at IBM Research - Zurich. There he worked on phase change materials and novel atomic force microscopy probes, inventing the PtSi probes that have since been commercialized and creating diamond-like-carbon tips for ultra-low wear. After a brief postdoc at Yale University, he joined the University of Exeter as a Lecturer and then in 2013 joined the University of Oxford, where he established the Advanced Nanoscale Engineering Group. He was promoted to Professor of Applied Nanomaterials in 2016. He serves as a director of the Oxford Fab. Since 2023, he serves as the Associate Head for Research of the Mathematical Physical and Life Sciences Division at the University of Oxford. He was the leader of the UK's Wearable and Flexible Technologies (WAFT) consortium across Oxford, Southampton and Exeter Universities and 15 industrial partners.

Research
Bhaskaran has invented several new technologies in the field of MEMS and computing. He has also played a major role in developing these inventions into business opportunities and commercialising them. Bhaskaran led the Oxford-based WAFT Consortium and also the research into smart windows, including applications in the glazing industry. The latter project was an Anglo-US project, which aims to harness the Sun's heat and use it to heat a home in the winter, but also reflect it in the summer. When talking about the project, Bhaskaran said to ScienceDaily "Here, we exploit tuning how invisible wavelengths are transmitted or reflected to modulate temperature. These ideas have come to fruition with the aid of our long-standing industrial collaborators, and are the result of long-term research." Part of Bhaskaran's recent career is spinning out companies such as Bodle Technologies and Salience Labs from Oxford University. Other more efficient technologies have also been developed by Bhaskaran, including producing new screen technology for devices with poor outdoor readability and high-power consumption.

Since 2013, he has been worked on photonic neuromorphic computing and routing. He is an inventor of the first photonic non-volatile memory the photonic tensor core, and has worked on amplitude based weight setting as the primary approach using functional phase change materials. His work on switchable photonics as part of the computational effort was instrumental in spinning out Salience Labs. In spite of his work on photonics, he is known for his more cautious approach to the future of photonics, often expressing skepticism about whether photonics will fully replace electronics. As quoted to Optics and Photonic news, '... he says it is not yet clear whether applications exist for which such chips would offer an unambiguous advantage over digital electronics—and, therefore, whether they really will be a commercial success. “That remains to be seen,” he says.'