Michal Lipson

Michal Lipson is an American-Israeli physicist known for her work on silicon photonics. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2019 and the National Academy of Engineering since 2025, Lipson was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow for contributions to silicon photonics especially towards enabling GHz silicon active devices. Until 2014, she was the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering at Cornell University in the school of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Cornell. She is now the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. In 2009 she co-founded the company PicoLuz, which develops and commercializes silicon nanophotonics technologies. In 2019, she co-founded Voyant Photonics, which develops next generation lidar technology based on silicon photonics. In 2022, Lipson was a co-founder of Xscape photonics to accelerate AI, ML, and simulation hardware. In 2020 Lipson was elected the 2021 vice president of Optica, and she served as the Optica president in 2023.