Contributor

Mahdi Nikdast is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU). Prof. Nikdast received his Ph.D. in Electronic and Computer Engineering from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, in 2014, where he was a member of the Mobile Computing System Lab (now called the Big Data System Lab). After his Ph.D., he started a Postdoctoral at Polytechnique Montreal, Canada, where he was a member of the Heterogenous Embedded System Lab, and in collaboration with McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
Prof. Nikdast has authored and coauthored more than 50 papers in refereed journals and international conference publications. He has edited a book on Photonic Interconnects for Computing Systems: Understanding and Pushing Design Challenges, published by River Publishers in 2017. Prof. Nikdast has served as a reviewer for many journals, including IEEE TVLSI, IEEE JLT, IEEE TCAD, IEEE TMSCS, ACM TECS, ACM JETC, Photonics Technology Letters, etc., as well as on the TPC of various international conferences. He is the founder and the program chair of the International Workshop on Optical/Photonic Interconnects for Computing Systems (OPTICS workshop) and the North American Workshop on Silicon Photonics for High Performance Computing (SPHPC Workshop). His research interests include various topics related to computing and embedded systems, silicon photonics, and high performance computing. Prof. Nikdast was a recipient of various awards, including the Second Best Project Award at the AMD Technical Forum and Exhibition (AMD-TFE 2010, Taiwan), the Best Poster Paper Award at the Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP 2015, Hong Kong), the Best Paper Award at the Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference (DATE 2016 – Test Track, Dresden), and the Best Paper Award Candidate at ACM Great Lake Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2018, USA).