Xiaodan Pang

Research profile

Xiaodan Pang is a Docent (Tenured Associate Professor) working at the Photonics Division, Department of Applied Physics at KTH. He is a group member of the KTH/RISE Kista High Speed Transmission Lab, a Guest Senior Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, and a Guest Professor at Riga Technical University, Latvia. His research focuses on high speed optical communications in fiber-optic, free-space and photonic-wireless systems. He has extensive experience and hands-on skills in digital signal processing, multilevel modulations, radio-over-fiber, mm-wave and THz transmissions, coherent tranmissions, Raman amplifications, system simulation and laboratory instrumentation.

Acamemic background

Xiaodan received his BSc in optical information science and technology from Shandong University, China, and his Master of Science in Photonics from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. In 2013, he obtained his PhD degree from Technical University of Denmark (DTU Fotonik), Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark. His PhD thesis is entitled "High-Capacity Hybrid Optical Fiber-Wireless Communications Links in Access Networks". He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at RISE Networking and Transmission Laboratory (NETLAB) in Kista between 2013 and 2017. During this period he worked for two years as an experienced researcher (ER) within EU Marie-Curie IAPP Project GRIFFON from 2013 to 2015. Then he has led a Swedish ICT-TNG Post Doc Project on Nonlinear Fourier Transform-based fiber-optic transmission in 2016. He has also participated in the EIT Digital Royal Garden Project during 2016 and 2017. He joined KTH Optical Networks Laboratory (ONLAB) as a researcher from April 2017 until February 2018. Then he became a Staff Optical Engineer and an EUMarie Skłodowska-CurieFellow at Infinera Corporation Hardware R&D from March 2018 to February 2020. He rejoined KTH Applied Physics Department upon the reception of a Starting Grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR) in March 2020. Xiaodan gave his Docent lecture in June 2022.

To date, Xiaodan Pang has (co)authored and co-authored more than 200 publications in journals and conferences, including Nature Communications, invited papers in IEEE/OPTICA Journal of Lightwave Technology and several postdeadline papers at OFC and ECOC. He has delivered over 30 invited academic talks at international conferences and workshops, including OFC, ECOC, OECC, ACP, etc. He is Associate Editor of Journal of the European Optical Society: Rapid Publications, and Frontiers in Communications and Networks. He was also Guest Editor of several Special Issues in Micromachines, Electronics, and Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. He serves as reviewer for over 20 journals including Nature Communications, Journal of Lightwave Technology, Optics Express and so on. Xiaodan has been General Chair of PGC'23-24, Track Co-Chair for OGC '21-24, TPC Chair for ICAIT'18, and TPC Member of OFC'20-22, GLOBECOM'20-24, OECC'21, CLEO-PR'22 and ACP'18-20, among others. He was the Subcommittee Chair of S1: Datacom  Subsystems and Systems  for OFC 2023, and is selected as the S-Track Program Chair for OFC 2025.

Xiaodan Pang is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Senior Member of OPTICA (Former OSA).