Prof Ladouceur's scientific contribution over the past twenty years covers a wide area of photonics technologies: from telecommunications, to sensing; from fabrication to simulation. Prof Ladouceur has lead large scale projects targeting the development of novel hybrid opto-electronics devices from their early design phase to their commercial realisation. Doing so, Prof Ladouceur has gained considerable expertise in modelling, design, material sciences, packaging and interfacing.

Optical sensing: Prof Ladouceur is a named inventor on the main patent underpinning a novel and disruptive approach to optical sensing in distributed networks. Based on liquid-crystal technology, this approach enables vast families of sensors to be read optically and thus to benefit from the advantages of optical networks over their electrical counterparts. An extension of this technology is now being applied to the brain/machine interface.

Brain/machine interface: Closely related to optical sensing, this major research effort leverages liquid-crystal-based technologies to read optically the neuronal activities within biological tissues. This approach potentially enables a quantum leap in the number of channels and offers substantial advantages over competing technologies.

Diamond waveguide: Prof Ladouceur directed the research effort at UNSW that lead to the first scalable all-diamond integrated circuits using a combination of photolithography, reactive ion etching (RIE) and focused ion beam (FIB) techniques with potential important applications in Quantum Computing and diamond based light- emitting diodes.