Owen Harris lands Teets Family Doctoral Fellowship advancing nanofabrication research
Owen climbing the notch on Longs Peak at Rocky Mountain National Park in winter 2025.
Owen Harris, a second-year electrical engineering PhD student, Teets Family Doctoral Fellowship has been selected as the recipient of the Teets Family Doctoral Fellowship for the 2026-27 academic year.
“I am grateful to be recognized with such a generous fellowship from the Teets family," Harris said. "Receiving the Teets Family Endowed Doctoral Fellowship enables me to have more agency over my research direction and pursue the most promising projects within our group’s specialty."
Established in 2022, the fellowship supports outstanding graduate students conducting research related to micro/nano systems in engineering through a generous gift from Peter Teets. Teets earned bachelors and master degrees in applied mathematics from Ҵýƽ and had a distinguished 37-year career with Lockheed Martin Corporation, ultimately serving as its president and chief operating officer. He later served as Under-Secretary of the Air Force. Teets’ generous gift is a memorial to his son, David, who was also an alumnus of our college.
Harris uses nanofabrication to develop next-generation, chip-scale light sources known as photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and aims to bring advanced laser technology out of the lab and into devices small enough to fit in your hand.
"We have some exciting progress in our long wavelength PIC project that I am looking forward to capitalizing on this year," Harris said. "The project aims to develop an entirely new material platform for integrated photonics which would make a large impact for long-wave infrared light sources."
Owens is part of the lab led by Associate Professor Shu-Wei Huang in the Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering Department.
Harris came to Ҵýƽ with a background spanning both industry and academia. He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics and a master’s degree in materials science from Tulane University in New Orleans, where he researched two-dimensional semiconducting nanomaterials in the Escarra Group. He worked on laser science and power beaming during internships at Lockheed Martin Space and on flight test engineering at Beta Technologies.
I’d like to thank Professor Huang and the other graduate students in our group for their mentorship and guidance through my first year in this program.
Many of today’s ultrafast systems still rely on bulky, expensive and power-intensive free-space architectures. Like the microelectronic chips found in everyday devices, PICs can be mass-manufactured, but they carry and manipulate light rather than electricity. Harris is particularly interested in generating ultrashort pulses of light on a PIC platform using nonlinear frequency conversion.
“Ultrashort light pulses and their corresponding optical frequency combs have transformed biological sensing, precision metrology, spectroscopy and fundamental quantum science,” Harris said. “The goal of my research is to translate this key technology to a platform that can fit in your hand, enabling broad deployment and commercial viability.”
Outside of research, he enjoys climbing, playing piano and working on his ‘98 4Runner.