David Plant of McGill University is one of the six recipients of the Killam Research Fellowships for 2013. The Fellowships provide $70,000 a year for two years to each of the recipients’ projects. They enable researchers to be released from teaching and administrative duties so that they can pursue independent research. The goal of David Plant’s project is to build tomorrow’s internet, by improving the fiber optics networks that are its backbone. These networks, once viewed as having unlimited capacity, are currently supporting annual capacity growth rates of 50-60%. Plant’s research will concentrate on fiber optic transmission and what are called silicon-photonic transceiver arrays. This will potentially address looming capacity limitations that will arise in the next generation of the hardware that powers the internet.
