Chris completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at UCLA in 2019, where he worked on novel techniques for improving the performance of terahertz quantum-cascade lasers.  He has been working as an NPP Fellow in the Submillimeter Wave Advanced Technologies (SWAT) group at JPL since the start of 2020 with a focus on developing terahertz heterodyne detectors for remote sensing using quantum-cascade lasers as local oscillators.

• B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University (2012).
• M.S. (2015) and Ph.D. (2019) in Electrical Engineering, UCLA.

• Terahertz and submillimeter wave technologies.
• Semiconductor lasers, particularly quantum cascade lasers.
• Photonics, metamaterials.

• NASA Postdoctoral Fellow, Jet Propulsion Lab (2020 – present)

1. Curwen, C.A., Reno, J.L., and B.S. Williams, “Terahertz quantum-cascade patch-antenna VECSEL with low power dissipation,” Appl. Phys. Lett., 116 (24), 2020. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0008867
2. Curwen, C.A., Reno, J.L., and B.S. Williams, “Broadband continuous single-mode tuning of a short-cavity quantum-cascade VECSEL,” Nat. Photon., 13 (12), 2019. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-019-0518-z
3. Curwen, C.A., Reno, J.L., and B.S. Williams, “Terahertz quantum cascade VECSEL with watt-level output power,” Appl. Phys. Lett., 113 (1), 2018. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5033910
4. Xu, L.Y., Chen, D.G., Curwen, C.A., Memarian, M., Reno, J.L., Itoh, T., and B.S. Williams, “Metasurface quantum-cascade laser with electrically switchable polarization,” Optica, 4 (4), 2017. https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.4.000468
5. Xu, L.Y., Curwen, C.A., Hon, P.W., Chen, Q.S., Itoh, T., and B.S. Williams, “Metasurface external cavity laser,” Appl. Phys. Lett., 107 (22), 2015. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4936887