Short BIO (Complete CV) – Mahdi Nikdast is an Associate Professor and an Endowed Rockwell-Anderson Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU) where he is directing the Electronic-PhotoniC System Design (ECSyD) Laboratory. 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 & OPTICS Lab). From 2014 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and Polytechnique Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he was a member of the Photonic DataCom Group and Heterogenous Embedded System Lab.
Prof. Nikdast and his students have authored and coauthored more than 100 papers in refereed journals and international conference publications. He has edited a book on Silicon Photonics for High-Performance Computing and Beyond, published by Taylor and Francis Group in 2022, and another book on Photonic Interconnects for Computing Systems: Understanding and Pushing Design Challenges, published by River Publishers in 2017. Prof. Nikdast currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (IEEE TVLSI), and has served on the TPC of various international conferences, including DAC, DATE, ICCAD, ESWEEK, NOCS, etc. He is a co-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, silicon photonics, and high-performance computing systems. Prof. Nikdast and his team were 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), and the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at ACM Great Lake Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2020, China). Prof. Nikdast received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award (2021), the George T. Abell Award for Outstanding Early-Career Faculty (2022), the Rockwell-Anderson Endowed Professorship (2022), and the George T. Abell Award for Teaching and Mentoring (2023). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.