CORNERSTONE's Introduction to Photonic Integrated Circuits: exploring the benefits, use cases, and challenges.

Professor Callum Littlejohns is Deputy Director of CORNERSTONE, Grant Manager of the £11.7M CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre, and University of Southampton lead in the €380M PIXEurope EU integrated photonics pilot line. He is responsible for the day-to-day leadership of the CORNERSTONE foundry, a silicon photonics rapid prototyping foundry that has supplied over 900 batches of silicon photonics chips to over 115 clients in 25 countries. Companies that CORNERSTONE have supplied chips to have collectively raised more than £70M in seed and series A investment. He and his team have won several awards including the Optica 2025 Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence award and recognition in the 2023 Electro-Optics Photonics100 list of people driving the global photonics industry forwards and being awarded. Callum has published a book chapter, over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and over 170 international conference papers. He served as co-chair of the Silicon Photonics conference at SPIE Photonex between 2017-2024. Callum is passionate about supporting the wide-ranging research community to turn their ideas into reality using the CORNERSTONE foundry and his proudest professional achievement to date is building the diverse, passionate and talented CORNERSTONE team

Remus Nicolaescu is the Co-founder and Managing Director of Pointcloud GmbH/Inc., a Zurich based technology company developing coherent 4D imaging solutions using silicon photonics. Prior to Pointcloud, he held executive roles with technology companies in the US, Europe and Asia. He started his career at Intel, where he performed pioneering work in silicon photonics topics, such as optical Raman amplifiers and lasers in silicon waveguides, and high-speed silicon photonics modulators. He obtained his Masters and Ph.D. in Physics from University of Bucharest and Texas A&M University respectively, and MBA from INSEAD.  

Dr. Sia Andersson is a senior researcher at the Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics (FhCAP) and overseeing and delivering projects in integrated photonics, including photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and other on-chip technologies. She has nearly a decade of experience in integrated photonics from design to fabrication and testing and specialises in scalable approaches to integrated photonics for a variety of applications such as quantum technologies, biomedical sensing and communications for industry. She achieved her PhD jointly from the School of Engineering at University of Glasgow and the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen's University Belfast.