Milan Mashanovitch

Dr. Mashanovitch is the Chief Executive Officer of Freedom Photonics, a photonics company based in Santa Barbara, California.

Dr. Mashanovitch co-founded Freedom Photonics in 2005, and has served as Director of Business Development from 2005-2010, General Manager from 2010-2016, and as CEO since 2016. In these different roles, he has helped grow the company to become a leader in innovative photonic components, with ~40 employees, and ~10 products, manufactured in Santa Barbara.

Dr. Mashanovitch has 20 years of experience working in the field of photonics, spanning over design, fabrication, testing and packaging of photonic integrated circuits, combined with 10 years of management and business development experience.

Prior to Freedom Photonics, Dr. Mashanovitch has worked at the University of California Santa Barbara as a Scientist, on photonic integrated circuits in Indium Phosphide, as well as an Adjunct Professor teaching graduate level classes on semiconductor lasers and photonic ICs.

Dr. Mashanovitch has co-authored ~ 150 papers, many invited, on photonic integrated circuits and various photonic devices. He holds 9 patents, and has co-authored the second edition of the “Diode Lasers and Photonic Integrated Circuits” textbook. He is very active in the photonics technical community, participating on technical committees of many conferences. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Dr. Mashanovitch holds a dipl. ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Belgrade in Serbia, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California in Santa Barbara.