Dr. Boubacar Kante is the inaugural Chenming Hu endowed Chaired Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California Berkeley, and a faculty scientist at the materials science division (MSD) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
Dr. Kante received his Ph.D in Physics from Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France and was subsequently a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley from 2010 to 2013. He then served as assistant and associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and a Qualcomm faculty scholar at UC San Diego before joining UC Berkeley in 2019.
Dr. Kante is best known for his invention of scale-invariant lasers named Berkeley Surface Emitting Lasers (BerkSELs) and he proposed and demonstrated the world first topological laser based on the quantum Hall effect for light, a demonstration selected as one of the top 10 discoveries by Physics World in 2017. His group holds the world records for plasmonic nanosensing (immuno-assay nanosensing) and for the bandwidth and efficiency of planar structured lenses, a structure he named “the Fishnet-Achromatic-Metalens (FAM)”. His group also demonstrated the first non-magnetic metamaterial invisibility cloak.
Dr. Kante won the 2024 Bakar Prize, he is a 2021 Bakar Fellow, and a 2020 Moore Inventor Fellow. He is a senior member of IEEE and Optica (formerly OSA) and received the 2017 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, the 2016 National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, and the best undergraduate teacher award from UC San Diego Jacob School of Engineering in 2017.
