Claire Gmachl (Ph.D. 1995, Technical University of Vienna) is the Director of MIRTHE, the NSF-sponsored Engineering Research Center for Health and the Environment. Her research group is working on the development of new quantum devices, especially lasers, and their optimization for systems applications ranging from sensors to optical communications. The special focus of her research is currently on Quantum Cascade (QC) lasers, a novel type of semiconductor injection laser based on electronic intersubband transitions in the conduction band of a coupled quantum well heterostructure.

Her current projects include the development of high temperature, high power, high efficiency QC lasers. Widely tunable, monolithic and external cavity, QC lasers are being developed for optical sensors in environmental, medical, and security applications. While my group is focused mainly on the development of the lasers, we maintain strong collaborations with many expert spectroscopists in academia, government and industrial labs, who are building sensor systems.