Boon S. Ooi (Fellow of NAI, SPIE, OSA, IEEE and InstP) is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at KAUST (Saudi Arabia). He received the Ph.D. degree in electronics and electrical engineering from the University of Glasgow (Scotland, UK). He has served as a faculty member at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and Lehigh University (Pennsylvania, USA). His research interest includes the study of III-V and III-Nitride based materials and devices, and their applications in optical sensors and optical communications. He has served on the Editorial Board of IEEE Photonics Journal and OSA Optics Express. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

Education and early career

Boon Ooi received his pre-college education in Penang, Malaysia. He earned the B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electronics and electrical engineering from the University of Glasgow (U.K.) in 1992 and 1994, respectively. He was an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) from 1996 to 2000. He co-founded a photonics startup in Pleasanton, California (U.S.A.), and led the company as VP for Technology Development from early 2000 to late 2003. He joined Lehigh University (Pennsylvania, USA) where he held an Associate Professor position and headed the Photonics and Semiconductor Nanostructure Laboratory from 2003 to 2009. He has been with KAUST since Fall 2009.

Areas of expertise and current scientific interests

Boon Ooi’s recent research is concerned with the study of III-Nitride based materials and devices, and lasers for applications such as solid-state lighting, visible light and underwater wireless optical communications, energy harvesting devices, and optical sensors.

Career recognitions

Boon Ooi is elected the Fellows of National Academy of Inventors (NAI), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Optical Society of America (OSA), International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), and the Institute of Physics (U.K.).

Professional and editorial activities

He is a regular grant panelist and reviewer of NSF (USA), NSERC (Canada), A*STAR and NRF (Singapore), Dutch Technology Foundation STW (Netherlands), FPS (Poland), ELIDEK (Greece), RGC (Hong Kong), QNRF (Qatar) and KACST (KSA). He has been the organizing chair for several IEEE, OSA, SPIE and MRS conferences, and served on the technical program committee of CLEO, IPC, Photonics West, ISLC, and IEDM. In KSA, he founded the IEEE Photonics Society Western Saudi Arabia Chapter and has been serving as the Chapter Chair since 2010. He was the Guest Editor for the Journal Crystal Growth (Elsevier) in 2006/7, and Applied Physics A (Springer) in 2013/14, and Lead Editor of a Feature Issue of Optics Express in 2018/2019. 

He has served on the editorial board of OSA Optics Express, IEEE Photonics Journal, and SPIE Journal of Nanophotonics.

Professional Memberships

• Associate Editor of OSA Optics Express
• Associate Editor of IEEE Photonics Journal
• Associate Editor of SPIE Journal of Nanophotonics

Education Profile

• Ph.D. Electronics & Electrical Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK, 1994
• B.Eng, Electronics & Electrical Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK, 1992