Mohammed N. Islam received the B.S. degree in 1981, the M.S. degree in 1983, and the Sc.D. degree in 1985, all electrical engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.  From 1985-1992 he was a member of the Technical Staff in the Advanced Photonics Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J.  He joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1992, where he is currently a Full Tenured Professor.  He also has a joint Full Professor appointment in the Biomedical Engineering Department and the University of Michigan Medical School, Department of Internal Medicine.

Prof. Islam was a Fannie and John Hertz Fellow from 1981-1985, and in 1992 he was awarded the OSA Adolf Lomb Medal for pioneering contributions to nonlinear optical phenomena and all-optical switching in optical fibers.  He also received the U-M research excellence award in 1997 and became a Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 1998.  In 2002 he received the Texas eComm Ten Award for being one of the 10 most influential people in Texas’s digital economy.  He became a fellow of the IEEE in 2004.  He is also the first recipient of the prestigious 2007 Distinguished University Innovator Award.

Prof. Islam has published over 135 papers in refereed journals and holds over 145 patents or patents pending.  In addition, he has authored three books and has written several book chapters.  He has also been an invited speaker at over 80 conferences and symposia.

Prof. Islam is also a serial entrepreneur, repeatedly taking basic science projects from the laboratory to the commercial marketplace.  He has been Founder and Chief Technology Officer of a number of companies including Xtera Communications, Omni Sciences, Celeste Optics, AccuPhotonics, Omni MedSci, and Cheetah Omni.  Xtera Communications is now a publically traded company, and it sells full end-to-end communication systems based on Prof. Islam’s groundbreaking work on Raman amplifiers.  Omni MedSci is commercializing technologies related to healthcare and medicine, and in 2015 it received the “Eureka Award” as being the #1 most Innovative Company in Michigan.  Omni Sciences is commercializing super-continuum laser technology to identify targets based on their chemical signature, and it is involved in a contract worth several decamillion dollars for advancing the technology in key homeland security, defense and surveillance applications for the US government.