Amir Arbabi and Ashish Kulkarni Receive Inaugural Glass Family Faculty Innovation Fellowships

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Ashish Kulkarni and Amir Arbabi

Associate professor Amir Arbabi of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and associate professor and Edward S. Price Faculty Fellow Ashish Kulkarni of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department are the recipients of the inaugural Glass Family Faculty Innovation Fellowships. 

The Riccio College of Engineering is pleased to announce the launch of the Glass Family Faculty Innovation Fellows program, an exciting new initiative designed to champion faculty-led innovation, foster entrepreneurial thinking, and accelerate the translation of research into real-world impact.

The college anticipates supporting two or three faculty members each year who demonstrate a bold vision for innovation and a commitment to advancing the college’s mission through creative, interdisciplinary approaches.

The program goals are to support faculty in transforming research ideas into startups, products, or public-impact initiatives; connect fellows with training programs, funding opportunities, and campus resources; showcase faculty innovation through public presentations and collaborative workshops; cultivate a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across the Riccio College of Engineering.

The resources from the Faculty Innovation Fellowship will support Arbabi in his project of developing a programmable photonic–integrated-circuit platform based on liquid-crystal–cladded waveguides. The platform is designed to be fully reconfigurable through dense electrode arrays fabricated on silicon chips.

Arbabi, who heads the Photonics Laboratory, explains that his approach marks a paradigm shift in integrated photonics by converting traditionally fixed-function photonic chips into reconfigurable, software-defined optical systems. Such flexibility could significantly reduce both the cost and development time for application-specific photonic devices, while enabling commercialization across industries ranging from optical communications and sensing to LiDAR and quantum computing. Arbabi explains that “the fellowship will provide critical support for translating this research from the laboratory into a market-ready prototype, bridging the gap between academic discovery and real-world implementation.” 

In addition to his research, Arbabi has engaged with startup-driven innovation in advanced optics manufacturing—he serves as a technical advisor to the Amherst-based startup Myrias Optics, Inc., collaborating to develop scalable polarization-controlled metasurfaces and other miniaturized optical components. This work contributed to a recent $1.5 million NSF STTR Fast-Track award for Myrias on advanced metasurface technology; Arbabi’s lab will receive $465,000 of this award, which it will use to design the nanostructure that enables the metasurface to separate polarizations rather than filter them. 

Arbabi was also co-PI on a recent $2 million award from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative in support of the new Advanced Optics Manufacturing and Characterization Facility on the UMass Amherst campus. 

Kulkarni and his research group will benefit from the support of the Faculty Innovation Fellowship as they work on developing a new type of skin therapy for psoriasis, a condition that affects approximately eight million people in the United States. Kulkarni describes the therapy as a sprayable gel made from smart polymers containing tiny rod-shaped nanoparticles, or nanorods, that are loaded with a drug engineered to block key immune pathways that are known to be overactive in psoriasis. Such an approach could reduce or eliminate the need for injections or systemic medications, offering patients a safer and more convenient at-home option. 

He notes that the team’s long-term goal is to translate the technology from the laboratory to the clinic, with the aim of creating a next-generation topical treatment for psoriasis and other chronic inflammatory skin conditions. As Kulkarni notes, “One of the driving forces behind our research is how to effectively translate it to help patients.”

Kulkarni has co-founded two start-up companies built on his research. The first, Volvox Sciences, focuses on designing nanoparticles to target macrophage immune cells, which can be educated to “eat up” cancer cells. This project won a competitive Manning/IALS Innovation Award in 2021. His other start-up, Quaesar Biosciences, works on diagnostics, using biomarkers to show which cancer patients are most likely to respond to certain therapies. 

In 2024, Kulkarni was named a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors, an honor awarded to researchers whose patented technologies, licensing, and commercialization efforts have contributed meaningfully to society. Kulkarni also received the 2024 Langer Prize for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Excellence from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Among several other resources provided by the fellowship, fellows receive up to $6,000 to support ideation, product development, and/or commercialization, and they participate in the I-Corps @ UMass Amherst Training Program or a regional short course offered by the New England I-Corps Hub.