Principal Investigator
Bernhard Schrenk was born 1982 in Austria and received the M.Sc. degree in microelectronics from the Technical University of Vienna in 2007. He was at the Institute of Experimental Physics of Prof. A. Zeilinger, where he was involved in the realization of a first commercial prototype for a quantum cryptography system, within the European SECOQC project. From 2007 to early 2011 he obtained his Ph.D degree at UPC BarcelonaTech, Spain. His Ph.D thesis on multi-functional optical network units for next-generation Fiber-to-the-Home access networks was carried out within the FP7 SARDANA and EURO-FOS projects. In 2011 he joined the Photonic Communications Research Laboratory at NTUA, Athens, as post-doctoral researcher and established his research activities on coherent FTTH under the umbrella of the FP7 GALACTICO project. In 2013 he established his own research force on photonic communications at AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, where he is working towards next-generation metro-access-5G networks, photonics integration technologies and quantum optics.
Dr. Schrenk has authored and co-authored ~190 publications in top-of-the-line (IEEE, OSA) journals and presentations in the most prestigious and highly competitive optical fiber technology conferences. He is named inventor of 10 patents. He was further awarded with the Photonics21 Student Innovation Award and the Euro-Fos Student Research Award for his PhD thesis, honoring not only his R&D work but also its relevance for the photonics industry. He was elected as the youngest Board-of-Stakeholder member of the Photonics21 European Technology Platform in 2017. During his extensive research activities he was and is still engaged in several European projects such as SARDANA, BONE, BOOM, APACHE, GALACTICO, EURO-FOS and the Quantum Flagship projects UNIQORN and CIVIQ. In 2013 he received the European Marie-Curie Integration Grant WARP-5. In 2018 he was awarded by the European Research Council with the ERC Starting Grant COYOTE, which envisions coherent optics everywhere.
Host Institution
With about 1300 employees AIT is Austria’s largest non-academic research institute and focuses on the key infrastructure issues of the future, including ICT technology such as photonic, wireless and quantum communications. Several experimental activities will be conducted within AIT’s Photonics and Quantum Communications Laboratory of the Center for Digital Safety & Security.