This paper presents a design technique for optical receivers that adjusts the damping factor of a 2nd-order transimpedance amplifier (TIA) synchronously with the incoming data. This approach allows the fast response of low-damping factor while mitigating the intersymbol interference (ISI) associated with underdamped systems. A differential shunt-feedback TIA (SF-TIA) is optimized to reach its minimum input-referred noise, with and without cross-coupled inverters at its output. The negative transconductance introduced at the TIA’s output improves bandwidth, noise performance and vertical eye opening (VEO). Dynamic damping is introduced by adding a triode-region transistor with a time-varying bias voltage across the outputs. Which modulation the damping factor of the system from -0.42 to 3.5 each unit interval. With dynamic damping, the TIA achieves more than twice the VEO compared to the optimized reference TIA.