Prakash Koonath

Prakash Koonath has over 20 years of experience in the field of photonics and lidar systems technology. In 1996, they began their career as an Engineer at Fujitsu Optel. Prakash then moved on to become a Research Assistant at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 1997, where they designed, fabricated and characterized photonic integrated circuits in III-V materials. In 2001, they were hired as a Senior Research Scientist at Altra Broadband Inc, where they developed algorithms to analyze and experimentally characterize signal degradation in single and multi-mode optical fibers. In 2002, they became a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of California Los Angeles, where they invented SIMOX 3-D sculpting to three-dimensionally integrate photonic integrated circuits in Silicon. In 2007, they joined OEwaves Inc. as a Senior Opto-Electronic Engineer, where they designed and characterized ultra-fast lasers that utilized photonic integrated circuits and developed algorithms to model the propagation of ultra-fast optical pulses in photonic circuits. In 2010, they joined Tanner Research as a Scientist, where they identified promising technologies, secured funding for new R&D programs, and provided technical and financial management of these programs. In 2019, they joined SiLC Technologies, Inc. as the Director of Lidar Systems Technology, where they designed optical system and scanner architectures with optimized lidar performance for autonomous driving and machine vision applications. Prakash also numerically modelled these architectures and designed experiments to verify their performance.

Prakash Koonath completed their Bachelor of Science in Physics from Maharaja's College, Kochi, India in 1992. Prakash then went on to obtain their Master of Science in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1994. Following this, they obtained their Master of Technology in Opto-Electronics and Optical Communication from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1996. Finally, they completed their PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2001.