Dr. Zizheng Cao is a tenured Assistant Professor in the field of beam-steered optoelectronic system in the Electro-Optical Communications (ECO) Group of Department of Electrical Engineering, TU/e. Dr. Cao’s research interests stem from his curiosity on how to efficiently deliver and detect wireless signals. It is a key for wireless communication and remote/non-invasive sensing. Next to the existing technologies in time and frequency domain, the approaches of spatial focusing and isolation are widely recognized as promising but not fully established solutions. Dr. Cao’s major research effort is to enable efficient delivery and detection of weak signals by means of beam-steering/forming. He mainly works at two areas: 1) new mechanisms, devices, algorithms and architectures to enable lightwave / millimeter wave various kinds of beam steering systems, including scenarios of line-of-sight (LoS), non-line-of-sight (NLoS) and complex wavefront; 2) applications of beam steering systems to indoor communication (e.g. optical wireless communication, OWC), metrology (e.g. LiDAR) and healthcare (e.g. blood sensing). His pioneering work results in a complete optically controlled mm-wave beam steering communication system, a new type of OWC transmitters for OWC system with NLoS beam steering, and a new design approach to simultaneously optimize optical and electrical properties of OWC receivers. These results lead to several publications in Nature LSA, Wiley LPR (cover story) and invited papers in IEEE journals. Dr. Cao has established a complete set of hardware and software to carry out aforementioned research, including state-of-art OWC testbeds, advanced IM-DD and coherent DSP algorithms (offline and real time), self-developed design kit of functional photonic system-on-chip (photonic integrated circuit, PIC), and automatic measurement setups of electrooptical chips.  

Zizheng Cao received his BSc in electronic information science and technology from Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China, and his Master of Engineering on telecom engineering (awarded ‘Outstanding thesis of master degree’ of Hunan Province, 2010) from Hunan University, Changsha, China. In 2015, he obtained his PhD with highest honors from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He is a recipient of a Graduate Student Fellowship (10 recipients globally) from the IEEE Photonics Society in 2014 and a recipient of TU/e doctoral project award in 2016. Dr. Cao started his tenure track assistant professor in 2016 and obtained his tenured position in 2018. He is serving the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) as a technical program committee (TPC) member. He is a member of the IEEE Photonics Society.

Dr. Cao has published more than 180 articles, including 26 first-author journal articles, including one article in Nature Light Science & Applications, one cover article in Wiley Laser and Photonic Review, one invited paper and one postdeadline paper in IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, and one invited review in IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics. He gave a series invited talks at international conferences such as PIERS2014, WOCC2016, MWP2017, ACP (2015/2017/2019), and Photonics West 2017/2019. He also co-organized IEEE Summer Topical Meeting in 2019. Till July 2020, his research articles have been cited for 1634 times, with H-index of 21 (source: scopus).