Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is a professor of applied mathematics in MIT’s Department of Mathematics. He works in the field of nanophotonics — electromagnetism in media structured on the wavelength scale, especially in the infrared and optical regimes — where he works on many aspects of the theory, design, and computational modeling of nanophotonic devices, both classical and quantum. He has published more than 200 papers and 25 patents, including the second edition of the textbook Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light. He has also distributed several widely used free-software packages for scientific computation, including the MPB and Meep electromagnetic simulation tools and the FFTW fast Fourier transform library (for which he received the 1999 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software). He earned a BS in physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering and computer science, and a PhD in physics, from MIT.

Selected Publications

• Romano, G., Johnson, S. G. (2022). Inverse design in nanoscale heat transport via interpolating interfacial phonon transmission. Journal of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization.
• Lu, L., Pestourie, R., Johnson, S.G., and Romano, G. (2022). Multifidelity deep neural operators for efficient learning of partial differential equations with application to fast inverse design of nanoscale heat transport. Physical Review Research.
• Lin, Z., Pestourie, R., Roques-Carmes, C., Li, Z., Capasso, F., Soljačić, M., and Johnson, S.G. (2022) End-to-end metasurface inverse design for single-shot multi-channel imaging. Opt. Express 30, 28358-28370 
• Pestourie, R. Mroueh, Y., Rackauckas, C., Das, P., and Johnson, S.G. (2022). Physics-enhanced deep surrogates for PDEs. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) ADAM workshop

Media

• November 14, 2019: MIT News, Researchers generate terahertz laser with laughing gas.
• May 21, 2019: MIT News, Mathematical technique quickly tunes next-generation lenses.