News: Optoelectronics
16 December 2021
Vector Photonics appoints Olek Kowalski as principal development engineer
Photonic-crystal surface-emitting laser (PCSEL) firm Vector Photonics Ltd of Glasgow, Scotland, UK has appointed Dr Olek Kowalski as principal development engineer. Kowalski brings both academic and commercial photonics experience, which he has gained from over two decades of design, R&D, project management, process development and material characterization roles in the industry.
Picture: Vector Photonics’ new principal development engineer Olek Kowalski.
“Olek is a well-known and hugely respected photonics engineer,” comments chief technology officer Dr Richard Taylor. “He has unrivalled expertise in high-power laser design and manufacture, which will inform our research and development of PCSELs for additive manufacturing and 3D metal and plastic printing.”
Kowalski joins Vector Photonics from Sivers Photonics (formerly CST Global), where he was a senior development engineer, managing commercial interactions with key foundry customers and overseeing increases in product quality and yield. He was also the technical lead for funded UK and European collaborative R&D programs. He helped to establish the company’s metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) epitaxial growth capability and worked on the development of its high-power distributed feedback (DFB) and buried-heterojunction laser products. Before that, Kowalski was a founder member and product manager at Intense Ltd from 2000 (a start-up acquired by CST Global in 2010).
Kowalski has a first-class degree in Physics and a PhD in optical spectroscopy from the University of Sheffield, where he also won the Ifor Austin award and Clarke prize for experimental physics. He then went on to be a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Glasgow, developing next-generation all-optical communication networks.
Vector Photonics appoints principal design engineer
Vector Photonics appoints process development engineer
Vector appoints principal device engineer
