Keren Bergman

Keren Bergman is the Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University and Faculty Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative. She leads the Lightwave Research Laboratory and directs CUbiC, a multi-university research center advancing next-generation connectivity technologies from edge devices to cloud-scale systems. Her research addresses a central challenge in modern computing: moving data efficiently. As artificial intelligence and large-scale computing systems grow, the energy and time required to transfer data—rather than to process it—have become the dominant bottlenecks.

Bergman was among the first to identify this shift and to demonstrate how light-based (photonic) technologies can overcome it, enabling faster and far more energy-efficient communication within and between chips. She has pioneered silicon photonics, integrating optical communication directly onto semiconductor chips to dramatically increase data capacity while reducing power consumption. The architectures she helped establish—high-bandwidth optical links, wavelength-parallel communication, and reconfigurable photonic fabrics—are now being adopted by leading AI hardware developers and hyperscale cloud providers to address the interconnect demands of next-generation systems.

She is a fellow of IEEE and Optica and a recipient of the IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and the Optica C.E.K. Mees Medal.

Bergman received a B.S. from Bucknell University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.