About Me
Greetings and welcome to this website! Here is built by Zhican Zhou (Albert, 周郅璨).
Zhican is a devoted student of physics with a passion for perpetual learning and exploration. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Integrated Photonics Laboratory (IPL) advised by Prof. Yating Wan at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Kindly access Zhican’s CV [here].
Research Interest
Zhican’s research focuses on on-chip laser technologies, heterogeneous photonic/memristor computing systems for AI acceleration, and secure hardware architectures for privacy-preserving data processing.
If you are securing potential collaborations or interested in the ongoing projects, please feel free to add the personal wechat (ID: Zhican_KAUST2022) or book an | online talk | (powered by Calendly).
Latest News
- Mar. 2026
Congratulations to Zhican Zhou on receiving the 2026 PSC Tingye Li Memorial Scholarship for Excellence in Photonics for his outstanding contributions to integrated photonic computing and hardware security. More information is available here.
- Feb. 2026
Zhican’s paper, “Integrated quantum dot lasers for parallelized photonic edge computing,” has been published in Advanced Photonics, demonstrating a cross-layer strategy for scalable photonic edge computing based on integrated quantum dot laser sources.
- Dec. 2025
Zhican’s paper titled “Chaos-based scalable optoelectronic physical unclonable functions with AI-driven dynamic authentication” has received acceptance in principle from Nature Electronics; readers are welcome to view the preprint version Here.
- July. 2025
The project “Broadband Photonics with Quantum Dot Driven Lithium Niobate Integrated Circuits” was awarded a Competitive Research Grant (CRG) from KAUST, receiving a total funding of US$100K. Zhican serves as a primary student contributor, collaborating with Cheng’s Lab in CUHK on the development of LN-based photonic computing technologies within the project.
- May. 2025
Zhican delivered an oral presentation titled “Deep Learning-Enhanced Dynamic Photonic Security System Using Multimode VCSELs” at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 2025 in Long Beach, CA.
- Feb. 2025
The project “Unlocking AI Acceleration: Integrated Silicon Photonics with Quantum Dot Lasers,” funded by a US$350,000 Basic Science Grant (BSG) from the Research Development and Innovation Authority (RDIA) of Saudi Arabia, was selected for exhibition at the “2025 Future Economy Innovation Week” in Riyadh. Zhican represented the team as the student delegate and demonstrated the project’s prototype system at the “Research Exploration” showcase.
- Sep. 2024
Zhican commenced a 3-month research visit at the Photonic Chip and Information System Innovation Center (PCISIC) at Peking University, working on packaging and high-speed testing of photonic computing systems.
- May. 2024
Zhican delivered an oral presentation titled “On-Chip Quantum Dot Lasers Driven High-Speed Optical Neural Networks” at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 2024 in Charlotte, NC.
- Apr. 2024
Zhican began a 2-month research visit at the UT Design Automation Laboratory at UT Austin, focusing on hardware-aware algorithm co-design for optical computing systems.
- Sep. 2023
Congratulations to our project titled “Fast and Energy-efficient Photonic Integrated Circuits Powered by Quantum Dot Lasers for Artificial Intelligence Models” for successfully securing $200k from the KAUST-Opportunity Fund Program (Collaboration with UT Austin). Technical specifics were fully completed by Zhican, who is appointed as the principal student responsible for managing and implementing the project.
- Jul. 2023
Congratulations to our project “Optoelectronic Hardware Acceleration for Variational Autoencoder” for obtaining $50k in support from the Saudi Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (SDAIA). Zhican serves as the student leader of the program.
- Jan. 2023
Congratulations are in order as our review, titled “Prospects and Applications of On-Chip Lasers” has been published in the prestigious journal, eLight, and was featured as a front-page article. Zhican is the first author of this paper.