Raktim Haldar was born in Kolkata, India. He is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, School of Electrical and Computational Sciences (SECs), Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar (IITBBS), Odisha, India. He is also the chair of Optical Metrology Technical Group, Optica (formerly OSA) since 2024.

His present research goal is to bridge the gap between integrated photonics and fundamental physics at the nanoscale. Raktim’s future goal is to develop indigenous experimental quantum photonic technology facilities. His research interests include integrated photonics, fiber optics and optoelectronics, nonlinear optics, integrated quantum photonic technologies, quantum information, quantum neural network, etc.

Raktim was an invited speaker in several conferences and Institutes worldwide including Cavendish Laboratory, University Of Cambridge (UK), IITs, NITs, Lamar University (USA), tcg Crest, SPIE Photonics West, SPIE Europe, 11th Humboldt Award winning ceremony on quantum technologies to name a few. He was also invited to attend Comlab#7 and #9 organized by the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation and International Journalist Forum for his contributions to science communication.

Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany since 2020, and an AvH Fellow at the same place since 2021. Raktim’s postdoctoral research was focused on discrete-variable (DV) quantum photonic systems. Within that period (in 2022), briefly, he was a visiting scientist at Paris Centre for Quantum Computing, Sorbonne University, France to work on quantum cryptography. Raktim obtained his Ph.D. from the E&ECE Department, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2019. During his Ph.D. tenure, in 2018, Raktim was a Raman Charpak Fellow at C2N/CNRS, University Paris-Saclay, France and performed experimental studies on continuous-variable (CV) quantum photonic systems. He received M. Tech. degree from the same department with a specialization in RF & Microwave Engineering in 2013.

Raktim has authored and co-authored about 25 peer-reviewed journals and 40 international conferences. He is also a regular reviewer of several prestigious journals, e.g., Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, APS journals like Phys. Rev. Lett., Phys. Rev. Research, Phys. Rev. X., etc., and many Optica, IEEE, SPIE, and MDPI journals. Being a student member and eventually the president of the IITKGP Optical Society of America (OSA) student chapter he was actively involved in various activities since 2015, including organizing Photonics 2014 and IONS 2014. He is a lifetime member of SPIE and early career professional member of Optica, and IEEE.

Raktim is a painter, photographer, and science enthusiast. He enjoys writing popular science articles, stories, and columns in Bengali and English newspapers and magazines.