Professor Raphael St-Gelais is the director of the Micro and Nano Systems laboratory at uOttawa. His group studies the interplay of optical, mechanical, and thermal phenomena in micro- and nano-scaled devices, with a strong focus on energy conversion and on breaking the traditional limitations of high precision nanomechanical sensors. He joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Ottawa as an Assistant Professor in 2018.

He obtained his PhD from Polytechnique Montréal in Engineering Physics in 2012 for his work on MEMS-tunable optical components and on-chip optical sensors. From 2013 to 2016, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell and Columbia Universities, where he pioneered the development of nanosystems for controlling and harvesting thermal radiation at the nanoscale. His work included landmark original demonstration of near-field radiative heat transfer and thermophotovoltaic energy conversion in fully integrated platforms, and was notably published in Nano Letters, Nature Nanotechnology, and Nature Communications. 

From 2016 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral researcher with Sankey lab at McGill University (Physics), where he studied coupling of mechanics and thermal radiative forces in low-loss mechanical resonators. He was awarded the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship in 2009 for his PhD work at Polytechnique Montréal, as well as postdoctoral fellowships from FRQNT and NSERC for his work at Cornell and Columbia.