Keren Bergman

Keren Bergman

Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering; Scientific Director, Center for Integrated Science and Engineering

Keren Bergman’s work at the intersection of photonics and computing drives to exploit optical data movement for creating energy efficient extreme performance data centers. The recent explosive growth in data analytics and need for intense performance is pushing current datacenter interconnects to their limits. Bergman’s research on nanoscale photonic networks is pioneering new optical computing architectures that will enable the ultra-high speed communication of massive volumes of information at

As director of Columbia’s Lightwave Research Laboratory, Bergman leads multiple research programs on optical interconnection networks for advanced computing systems, data centers, optical packet-switched routers, and nanophotonic networks-on-chip for chip multiprocessors. She is developing a new class of nanoscale photonic interconnect technologies that seamlessly move data from on-chip networks, across memory and large computing systems with extreme energy efficiency. These future platforms, driven by nanophotonic-enabled interconnectivity, and the enormous bandwidth advantage of dense wavelength division multiplexing, will fundamentally transform the computation-communications architecture, to create systems able to meet explosive information demands at all scales.

Bergman has been a faculty at Columbia since 2002 where she is currently the Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering and serves as the Faculty Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative. Bergman received a BS in electrical engineering from Bucknell University in 1988 and a PhD in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. Since 2023 Bergman is the Director of the Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC) a 5-year multi-university center funded by DARPA and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) under the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0). Bergman further serves on the Leadership Council of the American Institute of Manufacturing (AIM) Photonics leading projects that support the institute’s silicon photonics manufacturing capabilities and Datacom applications. She is the recipient of the IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE. 

Research Areas

  • Computer Systems and Computer Engineering
  • Networking
  • Photonics
  • Quantum Communications
  • Silicon Photonics

Additional information

  • Professional Experience
    • 2023 – Present - Director, SRC/JUMP 2 Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC)
    • 2011 – Present - Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering
    • 2014 – Present - Founder and Faculty Director, Columbia Nano Initiative
    • 2016 – Present  - AIM Photonics Institute, Leadership Council
    • 2002 – Present - Director, Lightwave Research Laboratory, Columbia University
    • 2011 – 2017     - Chair, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University
    • 2006 – 2010     - Professor of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University
    • 2007 – 2008     - Visiting Research Fellow IBM T. J. Watson Research Labs
    • 2002 – 2006     - Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University
    • 1999 – 2002     - Senior Member of Technical Staff, Tellium, Inc.
    • 1998 – 2007     - Senior Technical Advisor, National Security Agency
    • 1995 – 2000     - Technical Consultant, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies
    • 1994 – 1999    - Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
  • Professional Affiliations
    • Fellow, Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers
    • Fellow, Optica
  • Honors & Awards
    • Applied Physics Reviews Editors choice feature 2023
    • HPCwire People to Watch Award 2022
    • Meta (Facebook) Faculty Award 2021
    • Bucknell University Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award 2019
    • IEEE Photonics Engineering Award 2016
    • 2016 Herman Haus Distinguished Lecture, MIT
    • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, 2009
    • IBM Faculty Award, 2008
    • Optical Society of America Fellow, 2003 
    • CalTech President's Award, 1997
    • Office of Naval Research Young Investigator, 1996–1999
    • National Science Foundation CAREER Program Investigator, 1995–1998
    • AT&T Bell Laboratories Fellowship, 1991–1994
  • Education
    • PhD, Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • MS, Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • BS, Electrical Engineering, Bucknell University