Marin Soljačić '96

Professor of Physics
Focuses on nanophotonics, and on intersections between AI and Physics.

Research Interests

  • nanophotonics
  • nonlinear optics
  • artificial intelligence in science

Biographical Sketch

  • Professor; Physics Department, MIT, (2011-
  • Associate Professor; Physics Department, MIT, (2010-2011)
  • A founder of WiTricity Corporation (2007), as well as Lightelligence (2017)
  • Assistant Professor; Physics Department, MIT, (2005-2010)
  • Principal Research Scientist; Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, (2003-2005)
  • Pappalardo Fellow; Physics Department, MIT, (2000-2003)
  • PhD program, Princeton Physics Department (1996-2000)
  • Undergraduate at MIT (physics and also EECS): (1992-1996)
  • Born and K-12 education in Zagreb, Croatia

Awards & Honors

  • 2023 // Max Born Award (Optica)
  • 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 // Highly-Cited Researcher by Web of Science
  • 2017 // "The Order of the Croatian Daystar, with the image of Ruđer Bošković", the Croatian President’s top medal for Science
  • 2014 // Blavatnik National Award
  • 2011 // Young Global Leader (YGL) of the World Economic Forum
  • 2008 // MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship
  • 2006 // TR35 Award of the Technology Review: one of top 35 innovators under the age of 35
  • 2005 // Adolph Lomb Medal (OSA) "for the discovery of novel soliton phenomena, and for seminal and innovative work in nonlinear and time dependent photonic crystals."

Key Publications

  • “Biasing the quantum vacuum to control macroscopic probability distributions” Charles Roques-Carmes, Yannick Salamin, Jamison Sloan, Seou Choi, Gustavo Velez, Ethan Koskas, Nicholas Rivera, Steven E. Kooi, John D. Joannopoulos, Marin Soljacic. Science Vol.381, p.205, (2023).

  • “A general theoretical and experimental framework for nanoscale electromagnetism” Yi Yang, Di Zhu, Wei Yan, Akshay Agarwal, Mengjie Zheng, John D. Joannopoulos, Philippe Lalanne, Thomas Christensen , Karl K. Berggren and Marin Soljacic. Nature Vol.576, p.248, (2019).

  • “Tunable Efficient Unitary Neural Networks (EUNN) and their application to RNNs” Li Jing, Yichen Shen, Tena Dubcek, John Peurifoy, Scott Skirlo, Yann LeCun, Max Tegmark, Marin Soljacic. Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Sydney, Australia, PMLR 70, 2017.

  • “Experimental observation of Weyl points” L Lu, Z Wang, D Ye, L Ran, L Fu, JD Joannopoulos, M Soljačić. Science Vol.349, p.622, (2015).