Shen Yichen is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lightelligence, the world's first and leading optical computing company. Before founding Lightelligence, he was a scientist and engineer by training. He received his PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BSc in in Mathematics and Physics from Johns Hopkins University. During his doctoral period, he filed 10 US patents and published more than 35 peer-reviewed journal papers in Science, Nature Photonics, ICML and other top journals. In 2017, Yichen published a cover article on Nature Photonics, which for the first time proposed a theory to use light to perform AI algorithms. With this breakthrough, he was included on MIT Technology Review’s list of 35 Technology Innovators Under 35.