Jelena Vučković


Jelena Vučković is a Serbian-born American professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. Vuckovic leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE Institute, SIMES Institute, and Bio-X at Stanford. She is also director of the Q-FARM initiative. She is a Fellow of The Optical Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Vuckovic's research interests include nanophotonics, quantum information technologies, quantum optics, photonics inverse design, nonlinear optics, optoelectronics, cavity QED.

Early life and education

Jelena Vuckovic was born in Nis, Serbia. She studied at the University of Nis. She received her M.S. and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. In 2002, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Applied Physics Department at Stanford. She became Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department in 2003.

Career and research

Vuckovic is the lead/principal investigator the NQP Lab at Stanford, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE, SPRC, SystemX, and Bio-X.
As of 2018, she is a Scientific Advisory Board Member, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics ; Scientific Advisory Board Member, Ferdinand-Braun Institute; a SystemX Board Member.
Her PhD advisees include Ilya Fushman, PhD, Kleiner Perkins, , , professor MIT, and , professor EPFL.
, Vuckovic's research areas include: nanophotonics, quantum information, quantum technology, quantum optics, Integrated quantum photonics, photonics inverse design, nonlinear optics, optoelectronics, and cavity QED.
Vuckovic's lab invented a software suite called Spins. It automates the design of arbitrary nanophotonic devices by leveraging gradient-based optimization techniques that can explore a large space of possible designs. The resulting devices have higher efficiencies, smaller footprints, and novel functionalities., Vuckovic holds 15 patents.

Awards and honors