Deep Jariwala, an associate professor and the Peter and Susanne Armstrong Distinguished Scholar in Electrical and Systems Engineering in Penn Engineering, has been elected to the 2026 class of Optica Fellows, a distinction granted to no more than 10 percent of the society’s membership and reserved for researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the fields of optics and photonics. 

Dr. Jariwala is being honored “for his important contributions to understanding light-matter interactions in quantum-confined materials and pioneering excitonic metamaterials.”

“Being a fellow of Optica means a lot to me,” said Dr. Jariwala. “I entered the field of optics and photonics quite late in my research career, but was accepted into the community with open arms, and they have been supporting the work my team has done over the past seven to eight years. 

“I have a lot of people to thank for this accomplishment, most importantly, my students and postdocs who believed in our ideas and worked hard to accomplish them,” he continued. “I also want to thank my mentors and supporters over the years, and specifically my colleagues Nader Engheta and Cherie Kagan, who have been very inspirational and supportive of my group’s research in the optics and photonics domain.”

At Penn Engineering, Dr. Jariwala’s research explores how light behaves when it interacts with materials that are only a few atoms thick. In these extremely small spaces—known as quantum-confined environments—electrons move differently, allowing light to be controlled in new ways. His group designs materials in which light and matter interact so strongly that they behave almost like coupled pairs, called “excitons,” which can be engineered to guide, absorb or emit light with exceptional efficiency.

Dr. Jariwala’s work helps to answer questions of how devices like phone cameras, solar cells or optical communication systems can be made smaller, faster and more energy efficient. By developing new “metamaterials” that manipulate light beyond what natural materials can do, his research opens pathways to technologies that are thinner, brighter, and more powerful than what is currently possible.