Rate My Professor Niels Quack

Niels Quack is an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney. He served as Associate Professor in Micro- and Nanosystems in the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering from 2022 to 2025 and as Director of the Research and Prototype Foundry within the Core Research Facilities from 2024 to 2025. Quack is also a member of the Sydney Nano Institute. His academic career includes positions as SNSF Assistant Professor at EPFL from 2015 to 2022, where he headed the Photonic Micro- and Nanosystems Laboratory; senior microelectromechanical systems engineer at Sercalo Microtechnology Inc. from 2014 to 2015; and postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. He holds a Master's degree in Engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2005 and a PhD in Engineering from ETH Zurich in 2010, with his doctoral thesis titled "Micromirrors for integrated tunable mid-infrared detectors and emitters."

Quack's research focuses on micro- and nanosystems engineering, including micro- and nanofabrication, photonic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and diamond photonics, with applications in telecommunications, quantum information processing, and artificial intelligence. He has led projects such as developing technology for more efficient fibre-optical telecommunications by integrating optics and microsystems engineering and nano-electromechanical quantum interfaces. Key publications include "Integrated photonic devices in single crystal diamond" (Journal of Physics: Photonics, 2020), "Non-contact polishing of single crystal diamond by ion beam etching" (Diamond and Related Materials, 2019), "High-quality single crystal diamond diffraction gratings fabricated by crystallographic etching" (Optics Express, 2019), "MEMS for Photonic Integrated Circuits" (IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 2020), "Integrated silicon photonic MEMS" (Microsystems & Nanoengineering, 2023), and "Large-scale broadband digital silicon photonic switches with vertical adiabatic couplers" (Optica, 2016). With over 130 research works and more than 3,000 citations, his work has significant impact in the field. Awards include the Outstanding Paper Award from Nature Microsystems & Nanoengineering (2020), Supervisor of the Year from the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association (2023), the University of Sydney SOAR Prize (2023), Top 100 Innovators in Photonics from ElectroOptics (2024), and an ARC Linkage Infrastructure grant (2024).