Title: From Lab to Market: Building Lightfinder's Optical Sensing Platform
Abstract: High-performance optical sensing has long been trapped on the optics bench - constrained by the size, fragility, and cost of traditional instrumentation. What if you could put that capability on a chip? Just as the Apple Watch and WHOOP brought health monitoring from the clinic to your wrist, integrated photonics is bringing optical sensing from the lab to the field—unlocking a new paradigm for industries ranging from telecommunications and manufacturing to energy and healthcare.
In this talk, I will share the technical journey from Columbia SEAS to founding Lightfinder, an MIT spinout now growing in Kendall Square. The foundation began at Columbia, developing an ultrahigh-speed optical coherence tomography (OCT) system. Applying this system to tissue pathology prompted a longer-term look at where the industry would be in five to ten years. The next era of optical sensing would not be confined to a benchtop—it would be on a chip. A subsequent collaboration on a millimeter-scale Si₃N₄ supercontinuum source demonstrated that integrated photonics could compete with its benchtop counterpart while maintaining, if not exceeding, performance.
While the light source could be miniaturized on-chip, analyzing the light still relied on bulky, traditional optics. Miniaturization of the spectrometer was addressed during postdoctoral research at MIT. The digital Fourier transform (dFT) spectrometer is an ultrabroadband, ultrahigh-resolution spectrometer on a commercial silicon photonic platform, delivering 0.05 nm resolution across 380 nm of bandwidth (1260-1680nm).
Today, this technology underpins Lightfinder's mission to commercialize ultrahigh-performance chip-scale optical sensing systems. The talk will cover the core technology development, the journey of bringing innovation from lab to market, and how the next generation of engineers can join in building the future of optical sensing.
Bio: Dr. Diana Mojahed is the CEO of Lightfinder, an MIT spinout pioneering integrated photonics to deliver compact, high-performance spectroscopy and imaging across industries. Mojahed earned her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Columbia University and completed postdoctoral training in MIT’s Department of Materials Science & Engineering. At MIT, she was named a Kavanaugh Fellow and received an award at the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition finals. Mojahed is a 2025 Activate Fellow and serves as an ambassador for Optica, the scientific society for photonics.
Host: Christine P. Hendon