David Burghoff, an assistant professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a 2025 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA). 

The highly competitive DARPA Young Faculty Award program provides funding, mentoring, and industry and national security contacts to researchers in junior faculty positions at academic and non-profit research institutions across the United States. The goal is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers and mathematicians whose long-term research focus has the potential to address national security needs.

Burghoff, who joined the department in 2023, was selected for a proposal titled "FLASHES Frequency Locked Arrays for Scalable High Energy Sources." This project will use frequency-modulated combs to efficiently make optical pulses, which are important for many applications in manufacturing and science.

Dr. Burghoff’s research primarily focuses on the confluence of bandstructure-engineered photonic devices and nonlinear optics for applications in sensing, computing, and energy. His work emphasizes broadband devices and systems, and he is particularly well-known for his work in the mid-infrared and terahertz wavelength ranges.

He is the lead PI of the Precision Radiometry for Incoherent Spectral Measurements (PRISM) MURI, and his awards include the IRMMW-THz Young Scientist Award (2024), the Moore Inventor’s Fellowship (2022), the ONR Young Investigator Program Award (2021), the NSF CAREER Award (2021), and the AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award (2020).