MERL Sabbaticals

Leading MERL employees are invited to take sabbaticals once every six years.

  • Sabbatical leave is an opportunity offered to allow leading employees time to professionally develop their skills, while also fostering enhanced relations with university collaborators. Specific objectives for the employee may include learning a new technical skill, deepening their understanding or mastery of a technical skill, initiating a new relationship with a collaborator in a key strategic area, or working with a collaborator and their students in a specific area. The Sabbatical leave is not meant to provide help in any current MERL project, nor need it be in the employee's current sphere of work.

    The details of the program and how to apply are described in MERL policy "3-2.A.16 Sabbatical Leave". The maximum duration of a sabbatical leave is 3 months. The number of employees who can be granted sabbatical leave in a given fiscal year is limited in order to maintain project commitments and operate within a fixed annual budget. Applications for sabbatical leave can be made at any time.

  • Current and Past Sabbaticals

  •  Pu (Perry) Wang, Senior Principal Research Scientist (2025)
    Pu (Perry) Wang Picture


    Visiting scholar at: Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford

    https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/cyberphysical/

    Research Theme: Radar and multi-sensor perception and reasoning, hosted by Prof. Andrew Markham.

  •  Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Distinguished Research Scientist (2024)
    Toshiaki Koike-Akino Picture


    Visiting scholar at: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

    https://sti.epfl.ch/

    Research Theme: Collaborating with Prof. Giovanni De Micheli's team for hardware-efficient AI; and with Prof. Volkan Cevher's team for quantum-inspired AI.

  •  Petros Boufounos, Distinguished Research Scientist (2023)
    Petros Boufounos Picture


    Visiting scholar at: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

    https://www.mit.edu/

    Research Theme: Signal Processing for Quantum Technologies, hosted by Prof. Alan V. Oppenheim and William D. Oliver.

  •  Jonathan Le Roux, Distinguished Research Scientist (2023)
    Jonathan Le Roux Picture


    Visiting scholar at: Laboratoire de Traitement et Communication de l’Information (LTCI), Télécom Paris

    https://s2a.telecom-paris.fr/

    Research Theme: Diffusion-based and hybrid deep learning methods for speech and audio processing, hosted by Prof. Gaël Richard.

  •  Keisuke Kojima, Senior Principal Research Scientist (2019)
    Keisuke Kojima Picture


    Visiting scholar at: Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of California, Santa Barbara

    https://www.ece.ucsb.edu/

    Research Theme: Collaborating with Prof. Jonathan Klamkin’s team by jointly designing and characterizing photonic integrated circuits, with the fabrication done in the UCSB clean room.