Abdoulaye Ndao’s Quest to Control Light

Story by:

• Mika Ono- [email protected]

Topics covered:

• Photonics
• Optics
• Innovation

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Although still early in his career, Abdoulaye Ndao has started winning honors often associated with lifetime achievement - most recently, named a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors and fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.

The recognitions speak to the range and promise of his work at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, where he leads a lab bridging fundamental physics and better devices for sensing, imaging, data storage and memory.

"My work starts from really fundamental physics, going through the theory, to designing real, practical applications," said Ndao. "If you understand the fundamentals well, you can know which direction to take to make discoveries very, very impactful."

Man in the TV

Ndao, who grew up in France and Senegal, displayed an unquenchable curiosity from a young age.

Family lore tells of a young Ndao wondering why people who no one could touch were inside the TV. Seeing this as a sign of promise, his mother began to encourage Ndao's exploration of how things worked.

Ndao's path to the field of optics was also an unintended consequence, but this time of both curiosity and resolve. He started out with a strong aversion to the field.

"I did not like optics," he recounted. "I had a professor who told me, 'No matter what else you do, if you don't do optics, well, that means you are not a good student.' I decided I would prove him wrong."

Ndao doubled down on his efforts in optics and photonics and excelled. Along the way, he realized the area had some upsides after all.

"I was curious about everything that light can do," he said, "and I realized that fiber optics and telecommunications made it possible to call and speak with someone from a different country. Once I saw the practical applications, I started to appreciate optics."

He went on to earn master's and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Franche Comte (France), before postdoctoral fellowships at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley.

After three years as an assistant professor at Boston University, in 2023, Ndao returned to UC San Diego as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Programming Light for Smarter Devices

Ndao does not confine himself to a single optics or photonics niche. He looks for hard problems - then works from fundamental physics toward a device that might solve them. In his Nano-Devices and Applied Optics (NDAO) lab, his team tends to attack several photonics problems at once.

"The type of devices or problems I'm trying to solve can come from different directions and different ways," said Ndao. "Wherever it comes form, when I know is a real problem to solve, I focus on it."

Recently, in research published in Advanced Photonics, the team tackled the problem of creating tiny optical devices that are both highly sensitive and durable - two qualities long thought to be fundamentally at odds. Ndao and colleagues' solution could help enable a new generation of photonic technologies that are not only precise and powerful, but also easier and cheaper to manufacture at scale.

The lab is also advancing multifunctional optics. In one line of work, Ndao and his team are combining two different "smart" optical materials in a single transparent device - one that can be rewritten with light while also changing its optical response to humidity. The result is a platform that can hide or reveal different layers of information depending on how it is read, with potential uses in secure data storage, anti-counterfeiting and sensing.

In another project, the team is working to make image sensing and correction faster and more practical. They developed a system that can analyze a single image of a light beam and determine how that beam has been distorted by optical imperfections. By removing the need for extra measurements, specialized hardware or slow iterative calculations, the approach could streamline aberration correction in advanced optical systems used in microscopy, astronomy and communications.

Elsewhere, Ndao's group is exploring how light can be used to control magnetic memory. By shaping ultrafast light and co-designing it with multilayer magnetic materials, the team has shown a path toward flipping tiny magnetic bits with greater precision and at smaller scales. The work could help lay the foundation for faster, denser and more energy-efficient memory technologies that integrate naturally with photonic chips.

Ndao's hope is that these advances will be commercialized, although he feels his own time is best used making the discoveries themselves.

"At this stage of my career, I really want to focus on developing something fundamental and interesting," he said. "Perhaps there will be a student who is interested to move forward and translate the work into a startup."

Passion for Sharing Knowledge

To support and accelerate this research, Ndao is a frequent user of the facilities and services at the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute.

"Any device that I demonstrate is fabricated in the Nano3 Cleanroom," he said. "We make use of the Photonics Lab run by Nikola Alic. In addition, the people in the QI Business Office do a very good job on proposals, making sure that everything is done on time and in the right way; they go above and beyond."

He also holds lab meetings in QI's Atkinson Hall, because the conference rooms facilitate presentations by team members.

While Ndao revels in his research, he is also passionate about sharing knowledge with others.

"One of my favorite aspects of this job is mentoring people, teaching them, starting from zero and knowing that at the end of their PhD, they'll know more than me," he said. "Also, helping people realize they can do much more than they think."

His passion for teaching extends to the classes he teaches for UC San Diego undergraduates, including Introduction to Analog Design.

"I think this is the one of the most challenging classes in the department," he said. "Because students are coming from high school, they have to learn a different way of solving problems - teaching yourself, managing your time. I decided to teach the class to try to help those students. When I teach the class, I have office hours every day for the entire quarter, so that I am available to help as much as I can."

For Ndao, pushing the boundaries of photonics and pushing students to believe in themselves are part of the same mission.