Rate My Professor Gautam Vemuri

Gautam Vemuri, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Indiana University Indianapolis. He earned a B.Sc. (Honors) in Physics from Delhi University in 1984, an M.S. in Physics from Brown University in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1990. Following a postdoctoral stint at JILA, he joined the physics faculty at what was then Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (now Indiana University Indianapolis) in 1992 and has served as a professor there since.

His research lies in the broad areas of atomic, molecular, and optical physics, laser physics, and nonlinear optics. Emphasis is placed on the statistical and nonlinear dynamical properties of lasers, including destabilization of semiconductor lasers by weak optical feedback and nonlinear dynamics of diode lasers with two spectrally filtered optical feedbacks. Additional focus areas encompass quantum effects from light propagation in evanescently coupled waveguide arrays, such as diffraction management, competition between wave interference and boundary effects in finite lattices, disorder, Anderson localization of light, Bloch oscillations, and PT-symmetry breaking. He has also explored controlling characteristics of optical pulses via atomic coherence and interference effects. Key publications include 'Semiconductor Laser Dynamics with Two Filtered Optical Feedbacks' (IEEE J. Quantum Electronics, 2013), 'Optical Waveguide Arrays: Quantum Effects and PT-Symmetry Breaking' (Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys., 2013), 'Quantum correlations in integrated waveguide structures with disorder and next-nearest-neighbor coupling' (2025), 'Exceptional Points in a Non-Markovian Anti-Parity-Time Symmetric System' (2023), 'Effect of lattice boundary on Anderson localization of nonclassical light in optical waveguide arrays' (2023), and 'Parity–Time Symmetry in Bidirectionally Coupled Semiconductor Lasers' (2019). Vemuri's scholarship has received over 1,900 citations per ResearchGate. In physics education, as a SEIRI Associate, he promotes normalizing computing across the undergraduate physics curriculum and restructuring introductory labs to integrate experimental design, scientific writing, and data analysis for enhanced student engagement.