JQI Research Scientist Named Finalist for Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year Award

JQI research scientist Mahmoud Jalali Mehrabad has been named a top-ten finalist for the 2026 Falling Walls Foundation Science Breakthrough of the Year award in engineering and technology. He was selected from a shortlist of 30 potential winners for his innovative work on photonic chips that provide a reliable way to convert light of one color into many colors.

“Chips that convert laser light into new colors are engines of modern technology: They multiply frequencies, generate frequency combs for precision measurement and produce quantum states of light,” Mehrabad told the Falling Walls Foundation in an interview. “But all of this relies on a fragile requirement called frequency and phase matching: A device must support several colors of light simultaneously and circulate them at exactly matched speeds. Nanometer-scale fabrication variations—unavoidable even in the world's best foundries—are enough to break these conditions.”

Mehrabad is a member of JQI Fellow Mohammad Hafezi’s research group, where he leads projects on integrated photonics and AI. Mehrabad studies how to design and operate small chips that can manipulate light down to the level of individual photons—a field known as photonics. In particular, he is an expert in topological photonics, which seeks to use the design of a photonic chip to overcome the imperfections that creep in during fabrication.

For the work honored by the Falling Walls selection, Mehrabad used the principles of topological photonics to demonstrate a new method for taming these imperfections. In a paper published Nov. 2025 in the journal Science, Mehrabad and his colleagues showed that their new way of designing chips compensated for manufacturing defects without any need for extra steps.

“Disorder is usually treated as an enemy to be suppressed with ever-tighter tolerances and active correction; our results show that it can instead be made irrelevant by the architecture itself,” Mehrabad said.

The Falling Walls Foundation is named in honor of the historic fall of the Berlin Wall and brings together researchers, industry leaders and policymakers at an annual science summit. The Science Breakthrough of the Year awards recognize achievements in six categories: life sciences; physical sciences; engineering and technology; social sciences and humanities; art and science; and the women’s impact award. This year’s winners will be honored Nov. 9, 2026, at the summit in Berlin.

Story by Chris Cesare