Prof. John Donegan is a Funded Investigator at at CONNECT in Trinity College Dublin.

Prof. John Donegan’s research interests are in Photonic Devices within two main areas. The first is semiconductor lasers which use a high-order grating for single mode operation and which have simple fabrication. He is presently working on strategies to athermalise the operation of these lasers so that they do not have any change in wavelength with temperature. This work has application in temperature sensitive environments such as within data centres. The other main study focus is microresonators for soliton comb generation. This work is directed at the development of an optical frequency reference which is an essential new platform technology for high precision and high bandwidth optical communications.

Prof John Donegan received BSc and PhD degrees from University College Galway in 1982 and 1986. He had post-doctoral appointments in Lehigh University, Bethlehem, USA and in Max-Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung, Stuttgart, Germany. He was appointed to the academic staff in Trinity College Dublin in 1993, he is now a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and Professor of the Physics and Applications of Light. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, a senior member of the IEEE and the American Physical Society. He is the Deputy Director of the CRANN Nanoscience centre in Trinity College. Professor Donegan has an active collaboration with Professor Wei-Hua Guo from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. They have a joint project funded by Science Foundation Ireland and the National Science Foundation of China. Professor Guo was a former post-doc in CONNECT (when it was CTVR). Professor Donegan has published 350 papers in journals and conference proceedings. He has a h-index of 48 according to Google Scholar with total citations of 14,000. He holds patent on laser devices for optical communications and heat assisted magnetic recording.