SPRC Symposium 2025
The 2025 SPRC Annual Symposium brings together leaders from academia, industry, and government to explore the future of photonics. Unlike a conventional technical conference, the Symposium is designed as a forum for high-level exchange and cross-community collaboration. Talks are conversation starters rather than detailed lectures, with the emphasis on strategic insight and shared challenges.
Over three days, sessions will highlight opportunities and challenges across life sciences, communications and computing, and commercialization and materials. Keynotes and invited talks from internationally recognized experts will be complemented by poster sessions, partner presentations, and focused evening events.
The program is organized around two guiding themes:
- New Opportunities: what novel applications and solutions are enabled by recent advances in photonics, from biophotonics and optical interconnects to copackaged optics, quantum systems, and metamaterials?
- Key Challenges: what technical or organizational barriers, if solved, would unlock transformative new applications and accelerate adoption?
Participation is curated to foster substantive dialogue and collaboration. Attendees can expect perspectives spanning the full photonics ecosystem, including academic researchers, government labs, startups, and global technology companies. The Symposium’s purpose is to identify shared priorities, highlight emerging opportunities, and build collaborations that strengthen the global photonics community.
Daily topics and keynotes:
- Mon, Sept 15: Life Sciences, sensing, entrepreneurship & innovation
- Tue, Sept 16: A.I. infrastructure, nonlinear devices and photonic computing
- Wed, Sept 17: Copackaged optics, integrated photonics & quantum photonics
Special sessions:
- Mon, Sept 15, 3:15pm: Entrepreneurship & Innovation: partners & poster session
- Mon, Sept 15, 6pm: technical dinner on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate (TFLN) and optical computing*
- Tue, Sept 16, 6pm: conference dinner
Keynotes:
- Mon, Sept 15: Karl Deisseroth, Professor, Stanford University
- Tue, Sept 16: Hong Liu, Fellow, Google
- Wed, Sept 17: Claudio Mazzali, VP Global Research, Corning
Stanford speakers include:
- Tom Baer
- Mark Brongersma
- Jen Dionne
- Jonathan Fan
- Shanhui Fan
- Martin Fejer
- Guosong Hong
- Joseph Kahn
- Anne R. Kroo
- David Miller
- Amir Safavi-Naeini
- Jelena Vuckovic
External speakers include:
- Andy Bechtolsheim (Arista Networks)
- Sunil Bhave (DARPA, Purdue)
- John Burke (Beacon)
- Elio Champenois (ASML)
- Chris Dorman (Coherent)
- Dirk Englund (MIT)
- Hajime Inaba (AIST)
- Daniele Faccio (Glasgow)
- Nate Gallon (O'Melveny)
- Francis Ho (Walden Catalyst Ventures)
- Masahiro Horibe (AIST)
- Gordon Keeler (Beacon)
- Marko Loncar (Harvard)
- Keith Mathieson (Strathclyde)
- Joaquin Matres (GDS Factory)
- Timothy McKenna (NTT)
- Florian Oberstrass (Ultima Genomics)
- DP Prakash (DP2Ventures)
- Jorn Smeets (PhotonDelta)
- Michael Strain (Strathclyde)
- Robert Visser (Applied Materials)
- Ming Wu (nEye Systems, Berkeley)
