Dr. Kunal Mukherjee is an assistant professor in Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford. He has been an assistant professor in the Materials department at UC Santa Barbara (2016-2020), held postdoctoral appointments at IBM TJ Watson Research Center (2016) and MIT (2015), and worked as a transceiver engineer at Finisar (2009-2010).

The Mukherjee group specializes in semiconductors that emit and detect light in the infrared. Their research enables better materials for data transmission, sensing, manufacturing, and environmental monitoring. They make high-quality thin films with IV-VI (PbSnSe) and III-V (GaAs-InAs/GaSb) material systems and spend much of their time understanding how imperfections in the crystalline structure such as dislocations and point defects impact their electronic and optical properties. This holds the key to directly integrating these semiconductors with silicon and germanium substrates for new hybrid circuits that combine infrared photonics and conventional electronics.