Human societal and technological progress has coincided with how well we have been able to harness the electromagnetic spectrum in a technology that is scalable. In the next few decades, as we step into a world of ubiquitous connectivity, intelligent autonomous robotics, and cyber-physical systems, we will harness a spectral span stretching from 30 GHz to 300+ GHz, that is orders of magnitude larger than we ever had access to in human history. This shared spectral resource will serve as the backbone to enable intelligent, ubiquitous, and low-cost wireless access. As we have painfully learnt during the current pandemic, internet access has emerged as a critical means for sharing knowledge, and for allowing economic and education opportunities in the future.

My research aims to address the fundamental aspects of connecting information-to-electromagnetic-fields through new methodologies across the sensor interface to computational information processing, leading to end-to-end advanced communication and sensor technologies from microwaves to terahertz (THz) frequencies. The core emphasis is on fundamental techniques to control and manipulate electromagnetic fields in this untapped spectrum at deep sub-wavelength scales, across both spatial and temporal domain. This can manifest as secure wireless communication for 5G systems, new imaging interfaces for robotics and cyber-physical systems, high-sensitivity and high-throughput cancer cell detection for hand-held biomedical diagnostic sensors. My research work crosses the boundaries from fundamental techniques of sub-wavelength control of electromagnetic fields to large-scale integrated chips and information processing – an approach that not only opens-up unique and interesting design spaces, but also has crucial implications in advancing the field of wireless communication, imaging, and sensing across the electromagnetic spectrum. Through a unified approach of spatio-temporal control across the spectrum, I will highlight the following diverse works during the talk. 1) Intelligent and Massively Reconfigurable THz Holographic Metasurfaces using CMOS chip tiling. 2) Spatio-Temporal approach based Physical Layer Security for 5G wireless networks. 3) Origami based Adaptive Microwave Computational Imaging System. I plan to conclude with some of my future research interests.