Mahmoud Rasras

Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD Catholic University of Leuven

Research Websites: Center for Cyber Security (CCS) Photonics Research Lab

Research Areas: Photonic components for next-generation optical and microwave photonic networks


Mahmoud Rasras is an Associate Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University, Abu Dhabi. He received a PhD degree in physics from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium in 2000. He conducted his PhD research at IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Center) focusing on the development of a spectroscopic photon-emission microscopy technique to study CMOS device reliability.

Rasras has more than 11 years of industrial research experience. He was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, NJ, USA. His research spanned a wide range of activities towards the development of novel photonic components for next-generation optical and microwave photonic networks. This includes silicon photonics, opto-electronics, optical transceivers, photonic sensors, and all-optical logic technology for high-speed data encryption. He also developed a novel linearized optical FM discriminator for microwave photonics applications.

Prior to joining NYUAD, Rasras was a faculty member of the Electrical Engineering and Computer science at Masdar Institute (MI), Abu Dhabi. His group worked on a variety of research problems to address the current limitation of communication bandwidth. This includes designing high-speed transceiver circuits for 400Gb/s links and beyond. Additionally, much of his group research efforts focused on developing process technology for low-temperature germanium photodetectors integration on CMOS compatible platform (above 64 Gb/s). He also developed multi-axis opto-MEMS accelerometers in collaboration with GlobalFoundries (GF) and A*Star’s Institute of Microelectronics-Singapore.

Rasras authored and co-authored several journals and conference papers and holds 33 US issued patents. He has also advised several PhD and MSc students. He is a former Director of the SRC/GF Center-for-Excellence on Integrated Photonics at MI. He served on several TPC committees, including the Frontiers in Optics and Laser Science (FIO/LS) Conference. Rasras is currently an Associate Editor of Optics Express journal and a Senior IEEE Member.

Courses Taught