Steven Johnson
Room 2-388
Phone: x3-4073
stevenj@math.mit.edu
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Nanophotonics, High-Performance Computation
Steven G. Johnson received B.S. degrees in physics, mathematics, and EECS from MIT in 1995, at which time he also received the Orloff Award from the physics department and was offered four graduate fellowships. He completed his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 2001 under the supervision of J. D. Joannopoulos, and spent the next three years in postdoctoral positions at MIT and Harvard. He joined the MIT faculty in applied mathematics in 2004. Professor Johnson primarily works on problems involving nanophotonics: electromagnetism in wavelength-scale structures such as periodic "photonic crystals," in which light can be made to behave very differently than in
homogeneous media. His efforts in this area include: pure analytical questions of wave localization and the analysis of perturbations; the design of practical devices such as solar cells, nonlinear frequency converters, or new classes of optical fibers; to developing computational methods for emerging problems such as modeling quasicrystalline structures, large-scale optimization, or predicting forces from quantum field fluctuations. Professor Johnson is author or co-author over 100 published journal articles, over 25 issued patents, and two books on photonic crystals. He received (with M. Frigo) the 1999 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software, along with a Laurels Award in Electronics form Aviation Week & Space Technology, for his work on the FFTW fast-Fourier-Transform library, and received the 2009 Edmund F. Kelly Research Award from the MIT Mathematics Department.
