Conner Ballew is currently an RF/Microwave Engineer working in the Submillimeter-Wave Advanced Technology group (386H) at JPL. He received his PhD from Caltech where he worked on the design and fabrication of 3D, or "volumetric", meta-optics operating at visible, near-infrared, and terahertz frequencies.

The primary challenges addressed by his thesis work involves developing an inverse-design procedure capable of identifying optimal device shapes that perform a given set of electromagnetic tasks while satisfying fabrication constraints. Using these advanced techniques, vast amounts of electromagnetic functionality (e.g. focusing, color-sorting, polarization-sorting) can be simultaneously achieved in extremely small device volumes that can be patterned with currently available micromachining techniques.

• PhD in Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology (2021)
• MS in Electrical Engineering, University of Washington (2016)
• BS in Electrical Engineering, University of Washington (2015)
• BS in Mathematics, University of Washington (2015)

• Electromagnetic inverse-design
• Volumetric metaoptics

• Sensors, Microdevices and Instruments  | Nano- And Micro- Devices/Systems
• Sensors, Microdevices and Instruments  | Integrated Photonics, Direct/Coherent Detectors, And Arrays

• computational electromagnetics  
• inverse-design  
• metasurfaces  
• optical metamaterials  
• photonics  

• JPL Voyager Award | For leading a collaboration with Stanford University to develop an integrated photonics platform for THz receievers (2025)