Ryan Schilling, PhD

Research Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Office: Heavy Engineering 226

Email Address: ryan.schilling@stonybrook.edu

Bio:

Ryan Schilling joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering as a Research Assistant Professor in September 2026. Trained as an electrical engineer, he came to mechanics through the problem of dissipation: how and why vibrating structures lose energy, and how stress, geometry, and materials can be engineered to reduce that loss. His group develops chip-scale systems that combine ultracoherent nanomechanical resonators with integrated photonics to push precision measurement toward its fundamental limits.

Professor Schilling earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from EPFL, where his work in the Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurement helped establish strain-engineering methods for ultralow-loss nanomechanical resonators. He later developed integrated photonics for microwave-to-optical quantum transduction at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center and, as a senior scientist at Corning, worked on co-packaged optics and ultra-low-loss fiber-to-chip coupling.

Education:

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, 2018
M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada, 2012
B.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering, with Distinction, University of British Columbia, Canada, 2010

Professional Experience:

Research Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stony Brook University, 2026–present
Senior Scientist, Optical Physics, Corning Incorporated, 2022–2025
Postdoctoral Researcher, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, 2018–2022
Ph.D. Researcher, Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurement, EPFL, 2012–2018

Publications:

For a full listing of Professor Schilling's publications, please visit his Google Scholar page.

Overview:

Professor Schilling’s research group engineers mechanical devices with exceptionally low energy loss and integrates them with photonic circuits on a chip. The lab combines strain-engineered silicon nitride nanostructures, phononic crystals, and low-loss optical resonators to read out and control motion near quantum-mechanical limits. The group also uses physics-guided modeling and machine-learning optimization to co-design optical, mechanical, thermal, and fabrication performance. Applications include precision force and inertial sensing, microwave-to-optical quantum transduction, and scalable interfaces for quantum networks.

Highlights & Accomplishments:

Co-author of “Elastic strain engineering for ultralow mechanical dissipation” (*Science*, 2018), which showed how strain engineering and soft clamping can suppress mechanical loss in ultracoherent nanomechanical resonators; also contributed to demonstrations of measurement-based control at the thermal decoherence rate (*Nature*, 2015) and quantum correlations from a room-temperature mechanical oscillator (*Physical Review X*, 2017)
First author of “Ultrahigh-Q on-chip silicon–germanium microresonators” (*Optica*, 2022), demonstrating fully crystalline SiGe-on-silicon microresonators with intrinsic quality factors up to 1.71 × 10⁸ and propagation loss of 0.39 dB/m.
Named inventor on multiple patent applications in electro-optic and electro-optomechanical quantum transduction, and helped secure a five-year collaborative research program between IBM and the University of Tokyo focused on optomechanical photon interfaces.