Mahdi Nikdast is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins. Prof. Nikdast received his Ph.D. in Electronic and Computer Engineering from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, in 2014, where he was a member of the Mobile Computing System Lab (now called the Big Data System Lab). From 2014 to 2017, he was a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University and Polytechnique Montreal, Canada, where he was a member of the Photonics System Group and Heterogenous Embedded System Lab. He is the director of Electronic-PhotoniC System Design (ECSyD) Laboratory at CSU. Prof. Nikdast has authored and coauthored numerous papers in refereed journals and international conference publications. He is the founder of the International Workshop on Optical/Photonic Interconnects for Computing Systems (OPTICS workshop) and the North American Workshop on Silicon Photonics for High-Performance Computing (SPHPC Workshop). His research interests include various topics related to integrated photonics and high-performance computing. Prof. Nikdast currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (IEEE TVLSI). He was the recipient of various awards, including the Second Best Project Award at the AMD Technical Forum and Exhibition (AMD-TFE 2010, Taiwan), the Best Paper Award at the Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP 2015, Hong Kong), the Best Paper Award at the Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference (DATE 2016 – Test Track, Dresden), the Best Paper Award Candidate at ACM Great Lake Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2018, USA), the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at ACM Great Lake Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2020, China), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2021. Prof. Nikdast is a Senior Member of IEEE.