Biographical Sketch

Since 1995, Professor Malvin Carl Teich has been teaching and pursuing his research interests at Boston University, as a faculty member with joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Physics. He is Director of the Quantum Photonics Laboratory and a Member of the Photonics Center, the Center for Adaptive Systems, the Hearing Research Center, and the Program in Neuroscience. He serves as a consultant to government and private industry. He has extensive experience in trade-secret infringement litigation and has served as an expert in numerous patent conflict cases. Dr. Teich is most widely known for his work in photonics and for his studies of fractal stochastic processes and information transmission in biological systems. His current efforts in photonics are directed toward the development of systems that make use of the correlation and entanglement properties of twin photon beams, such as quantum optical coherence tomography, and the design and development of ultralow-noise avalanche photodiodes. His work in fractals is directed toward elucidating the statistical properties of sensory-system action-potential patterns and the heartbeat sequences of patients with coronary disorders.

Dr. Teich's first professional association, in 1966, was with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he demonstrated that heterodyne detection could be achieved in the middle-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. He joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1967, where he served as a member of the Electrical Engineering Department (as Chairman from 1978 to 1980), the Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics Department, the Columbia Radiation Laboratory in the Department of Physics, and the Fowler Memorial Laboratory at the Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons. Extending his work on heterodyning, he recognized that the interaction could be understood in terms of the absorption of individual polychromatic photons and demonstrated the possibility of implementing the process in a multiphoton configuration. He developed the concept of nonlinear heterodyne detection — useful for canceling phase or frequency noise in an optical system. In collaboration with his students and with colleagues at the College of Physicians & Surgeons, he conducted heterodyne velocity measurements of the vibratory motion of individual sensory cells in the cochlea, discovering that these cells vibrate spontaneously even when no acoustic signal is present.

During his tenure at Columbia, he also carried out extensive research in the areas of photon statistics and point processes, noise in avalanche photodiodes and fiber-optic amplifiers, and the generation of squeezed light. Among his achievements is a description of luminescence light in terms of clustered photon emissions. This perspective led him to suggest that detector dead time could be advantageously used to reduce photon clustering and thereby luminescence noise. This approach was incorporated in the design of the star-scanner guidance system for the Galileo spacecraft, which was subjected to strong radio- and beta-luminescence background light as a result of bombardment by copious Jovian gamma- and beta-ray emissions. In a similar vein, he suggested that dead space could be effectively used to minimize carrier clustering in the multiplication region of an avalanche photodiode. This implementation resulted in a new class of ultralow-noise avalanche photodetectors suitable for use in lightwave communication systems. His work on fiber-optic amplifiers led to an understanding of the statistical properties of the photons emerging from the amplification process and thereby to improved measures of performance for these devices. He subsequently showed that the same mathematical approach was applicable to modeling the flow of neural events in human sensory systems and for characterizing their performance. He discovered the presence of fractal behavior in neural signals such as auditory- and visual-system action-potential sequences and neurotransmitter exocytosis. In the domain of quantum optics, he developed the concept of pump-fluctuation control; using a space-charge-limited version of the classic Franck-Hertz experiment in mercury vapor, he demonstrated the validity of this concept by generating the first source of unconditionally photon-number-squeezed light. In 1996 he was appointed Professor Emeritus of Engineering Science and Applied Physics in Columbia University.

His academic credentials include an S.B. degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. degree from Cornell University. His bachelor's thesis comprised a measurement of the total neutron cross section of palladium metal at the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory while his doctoral dissertation reported the first observation of the two-photon photoelectric effect in sodium metal. During the course of his career, he spent sabbatical leaves at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California at San Diego.

Dr. Teich is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Acoustical Society of America. He is a member of Sigma Xi and Tau Beta Pi. In 1969 he received the IEEE Browder J. Thompson Memorial Prize for his paper "Infrared Heterodyne Detection." He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. In 1992 he was honored with the Memorial Gold Medal of Palacký University in the Czech Republic. He received the 1997 IEEE Morris E. Leeds Award. In 2003 he was selected as the University of Pennsylvania Herman P. Schwan Distinguished Lecturer and in 2009 he was designated as the Boston University College of Engineering Distinguished Lecturer. He has authored or coauthored some 350 journal articles/book chapters and holds six patents. He is the coauthor of Fundamentals of Photonics (Wiley, 2007, 2nd Ed., with B. E. A. Saleh) and of Fractal-Based Point Processes (Wiley, 2005, with S. B. Lowen).

Among his professional activities, he served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Panel for the journal Optics Letters from 1977 to 1979, as a Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation from 1989 to 1992, and as Deputy Editor of Quantum Optics from 1988 to 1994. He is currently a Member of the Editorial Board of the journal Jemná Mechanika a Optika, a Traveling Lecturer of the Optical Society of America, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.