How Dream Photonics is helping to transform advanced tech manufacturing in B. C.

Like many start-up companies, it started with a dream. “My motivation was to create local employment,” said UBC engineering professor Dr. Lukas Chrostowski. He saw that highly skilled tech workers were leaving B.C. for job opportunities elsewhere. “I wanted students to be able to stay and work in Canada.” Dr. Chrostowski has spent decades researching optics, lasers and photonics—the science and technology of using light to transmit information. He saw an opportunity to harness photonics to solve some of the challenges facing next-generation technologies. If data could move faster, more efficiently and use less energy, it could power quantum technologies and large-scale communications…