Prof. Francois Ladouceur

Prof Ladouceur graduated from Institute of Advanced Studies at ANU in 1992. He held a post-doctoral (research engineer) position at LETI (Grenoble) from 1992 to 1994 and worked as Research Fellow at ANU from 1994 to 1998. Following this early academic career, Prof Ladouceur moved to the private section in 1998 to commercialise his research output with Virtual Photonics. In 2001, Prof Ladouceur became the founding Managing Director of the Bandwidth Foundry Pty Ltd after successfully raising ~$20 million from private and public sources. Prof Ladouceur has joined UNSW in 2005 and developed a comprehensive research program that covers:
• Integrated optics
• Silica and diamond-based photonics
• Optical sensing networks
• Photonics-based brain/machine interfaces
A/Prof Ladouceur has made key contributions to both fundamental waveguide theory and applied integrated optics:
• Applied integrated optics: A/Prof Ladouceur introduced in 1995 a radically new approach to the design of waveguide path design. This approach, based on adiabatic parameterised paths has lead to significant improvement in both the size of integrated optics devices and of the ease of design.
• Waveguide theory: A/Prof Ladouceur suggested that stable spatial solitons induce in its supporting medium a waveguide which itself could carry light as a linear structure. A/Prof Ladouceur also suggested a powerful self-consistency approach to this problem that provided a mathematical alternative to the cumbersome (albeit powerful) inverse scattering approach.