Biography: Mahdi Nikdast is an Associate Professor and Endowed Rockwell-Anderson Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University  (CSU), Fort Collins, where he is directing the Electronic-PhotoniC System Design (ECSyD) Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Electronic and Computer Engineering  from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, in  2014. From 2014 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and  Polytechnique Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His research interests are at the intersection of integrated photonics, emerging technologies, and high-performance computing.  Prof. Nikdast and his students have published numerous papers in refereed journals and international conference publications and across different areas of VLSI, EDA, Photonics, Embedded Systems, Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Computer Architecture. He has edited a book on Silicon Photonics for High-Performance Computing and Beyond,  published by Taylor and Francis Group in 2022, and another book on Photonic Interconnects for Computing  Systems: Understanding and Pushing Design Challenges, published by River Publishers in 2017. Prof. Nikdast  currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (IEEE TVLSI), and has served on the TPC of various international conferences, including DAC, OFC, DATE, ICCAD, ESWEEK, NOCS,  etc. He is a co-founder of the International Workshop on Optical/Photonic Interconnects for Computing Systems (OPTICS workshop) and the North American Workshop on Silicon Photonics for High-Performance Computing  (SPHPC Workshop). Prof. Nikdast and his team were the recipient of various awards, including the Second Best  Project Award at the AMD Technical Forum and Exhibition (AMD-TFE 2010, Taiwan), the Best Paper Award at the  Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP 2015, Hong Kong), the Best Paper Award at the Design,  Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference (DATE 2016 – Test Track, Dresden), the Best Paper Award  Candidate at ACM Great Lake Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2018, USA), and the Best Paper Honorable Mention  Award at ACM Great Lake Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2020, China). Prof. Nikdast received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award (2021), the George T. Abell Award for Outstanding Early-Career Faculty (2022), the Rockwell-Anderson Professorship (2022), and the George T. Abell Award for Teaching and Mentoring (2023). He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.