Deep Jariwala: The 2025 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award – Academic Focus

Deep Jariwala, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, is a rising star in the community of nano, quantum, and low-dimensional materials for opto-electronic and photonic device applications. His research focuses on the study of nanometer and atomic scale devices, materials and interfaces for applications in computing, sensing, information technology, and renewable energy. Jariwala combines new techniques to assemble, grow, and integrate nanostructured materials to create novel electronic and photonic devices. In a career of less than five years at the University of Pennsylvania, Jariwala has already made invaluable contributions in the fundamental photonics of low-dimensional excitonic and magnetic optical materials, as well as in imaging and characterization of interfaces. Most importantly, his approach to science and research is careful, rigorous, and meticulous while taking a broad multidisciplinary perspective at the same time – a rare attribute. He is bridging the field of optics and photonics with materials science and device physics to create new avenues for research of relevance to SPIE and other academic communities.

In 2022 alone, he received a Sloan Research Fellowship; the Young Scientist Prize in Semiconductors from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics; and the IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award. He also received the 2021 Thin Film Division Paul H. Holloway Young Investigator Award from the American Vacuum Society, a 2020 Frontiers of Materials Award from the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, and a Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office in 2019. In 2014, he received an SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship. Jariwala has served as peer reviewer for two SPIE journals, the Journal of Nanophotonics and the Journal of Photonics for Energy, and has presented papers and invited talks at SPIE Optics + Photonics and SPIE Photonics West.

“Deep is on a rapidly rising trajectory and has received several early-career awards that speak to the regard in which he is held by his colleagues,” notes Harry A. Atwater, Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, and director of the Liquid Sunlight Alliance at the California Institute of Technology. “On a personal level, he is at once scientifically highly inquisitive and takes his work seriously but takes himself lightly. He is also extremely poised and unflappable, and – almost without exception – right about any point that he chooses to seriously debate. I find him to be an extremely engaging colleague. My own personal interactions with Deep have been scientifically exciting--every time he came into my office, I learned something new, quite often about an effect that he had identified or discovered. Deep is an excellent communicator, and while scientifically aggressive, he is very pleasant and personally unassuming. He also happens to be one of the leading young scientists in the world working in the burgeoning nanotechnology field of two-dimensional materials and photonics.”

Meet the other 2025 SPIE Society Award recipients.

Read more about Deep Jariwala and the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award – Academic Focus.