Professor Eric Larkins is the Head of the Photonic and Radio Frequency Engineering Group. His research interests include laser diodes (both high-power and high-speed), functional photonic devices, nanophotonics, photonic-electronic convergence.

Professor Larkins received the BS degree in electrical engineering with distinction from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA in 1980, where he also became involved with GaAs-based semiconductor materials and devices. He received the MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering with a physics minor from Stanford University, Stanford, California in 1985 and 1991 repsectively. He pursued his doctoral research on light-emitting heterostructure thyristor switches and molecular beam epitaxy, receiving full support from 1984-5 as a Solid State Affiliates Fellow and from 1985 as a Kodak Fellow.

He joined the Explorative Technology Group at the Fraunhofer Institut fur Angewandte Festkorperphysik in Freiburg, Germany in 1991, where he worked on high-speed semiconductor lasers, InGaAs/GaAs MSM photodetectors, 3-5µm and 8-12µm intersubband photodetectors and optical modulators. At the Fraunhofer Institute, Professor Larkins and his colleagues developed the MBE growth of highly-strained pseudomorphic In_0.35Ga_O.65As/GaAs quantum wells and laser with record direct modulation bandwidths (>40GHz).

He joined the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Nottingham as a Lecturer in October 1994 and was appointed Reader in 1998 and Professor of Optoelectronics in 2002. He is the author of more than 200 papers, several book chapters and two US patents on optical thyristor switches and switching circuits and co-author of a German patent for an intersubband infrared photodetector.

Professor Larkins is a member of the Photonics21 European Technology Platform. He co-chaired the 8^th International Conference on the Numerical Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices (NUSOD) in 2008 and is a member of the NUSOD Steering Committee. He is a senior member of the IEEE.