Principal Investigator
Mercedeh Khajavikhan
Email: khajavik@usc.edu
628 PHE Building
3737 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089
Professor Khajavikhan joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, Viterbi College of Engineering, in August 2019 as an Associate Professor and promoted to a full professor rank in January 2022. She has also a joint appointment at the Department of Physics & Astronomy, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, & Sciences at USC.
She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2009. Subsequently, she joined the University of California in San Diego as a postdoctoral researcher, where she worked on the design and development of nanolasers, plasmonic devices, and silicon photonics components. In August 2012, she started her career as an Assistant Professor in the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) at the University of Central Florida (UCF), working primarily on unraveling novel phenomena in active photonic systems.
She is the recipient of the NSF Early CAREER Award in 2015, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2016, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2018, the University of central Florida Reach for the Stars Award in 2017, UCF Luminary Award in 2018, and DARPA Director’s Fellowship in 2020. She is a fellow of Optica (formerly known as Optical Society of America OSA) and APS (American Physical Society).
Graduate Students
Abraham M. Berman Bradley, PhD student
Email: bermanbr@usc.edu
B.A. in Physics, Wesleyan University
Hediyeh M. Dinani, PhD student
Email: hediyehm@usc.edu
B.Sc. from Isfahan University of Technology
Jongheon Lee, PhD student
Email: jongheon@usc.edu
BS: Kyung Hee University, Electronic Engineering (2019)
MS: Kyung Hee University, Electronic Engineering (2021)
Ethan Levy, PhD student
Email: levyetha@usc.edu
BS: Physics University of Maryland (2024)