David Burghoff, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, has been named a 2022 Moore Inventor Fellow.

He is one of five fellows named this year by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The fellows program supports scientist-inventors who create new tools and technologies with a high potential to accelerate progress in scientific discovery, environmental conservation and patient care.

Each fellow receives a total of $825,000 over three years to drive their invention forward.

Burghoff aims to produce the first compact and broadband light sources in longwave infrared. These devices will have the potential to sense chemical concentrations and measure changes in the structure of molecules in real time.

Applications could range from medical breathalyzers, to deep tissue imaging, to greenhouse gas detection.

“I’m excited to be able to realize our devices,” said Burghoff, who directs the Quantum and Nonlinear Optoelectronics Group at Notre Dame. “I’m especially grateful to be working with the team of advisors the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has assembled, who have experience taking inventions from prototypes to production.”

“The main advantage of the devices we will be creating,” said Burghoff, “is that they will have broad bandwidths, which are needed for detecting an array of chemical compounds in cluttered environments.”

Burghoff joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2018. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2021, he won the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, an NSF CAREER Award, and an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award. He has written more than 40 papers in the area of quantum optoelectronics, frequency comb generation, comb spectroscopy, and nonlinear optics.