PLENARY SPEAKERS

Javier Aizpurua is a Research Professor of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) at the Center for Materials Physics in San Sebastián, Spain, where he leads the “Theory of Nanophotonics Group” (https://cfm.ehu.es/nanophotonics/). Aizpurua has developed theory to understand the interaction of light and nanostructured materials in a variety of field-enhanced spectroscopy and microscopy configurations, such as in  SERS, SEIRA, s-SNOM, STM, or STEM. The understanding of the optical response of complex nanosystems has been the main focus of his research, particularly in the field of optical nanoantennas and nanoplasmonics, with special emphasis on the role of quantum effects in nanophotonics.

Speech Title: Addressing quantum effects in nanocavity-enhanced molecular spectroscopy.

Hatice Altug is Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) and the head of BioNanoPhotonic Systems Laboratory (https://www.epfl.ch/labs/bios/) since 2013. Her research activities are highly interdisciplinary and focused mostly on the application of nanophotonics to biosensing, biospectroscopy and bioimaging. Her laboratory is developing state-of-the-art bioanalytical devices for life science research, disease diagnostics and point-of-care testing by combining various toolkits and approaches such as nanophotonics, nanofabrication, microfluidics, lab-on-a-chip integration, surface chemistry and high-end data science techniques. Prof. Altug received her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University (U.S.) in 2007 and her B.S. in Physics from Bilkent University (Turkey) in 2000. Before joining to EPFL, she was professor at Boston University from 2007 to 2013. Prof. Altug is the recipient of several international awards including European Physical Society Emmy Noether Distinction, Optica (formerly OSA) Adolph Lomb Medal, U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award and Koc University Science Medal. She received ERC Consolidator and Proof of Concept Grants, U.S. ONR Young Investigator Award, U.S. NSF CAREER Award, Massachusetts Life Science Center New Investigator Award. She is an elected fellow of Optica. In 2011, she has been named to Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” list. 

Speech Title: Nanophotonics: Enabling Technology for Next Generation Biosensing, BioSpectoscopy and BioImaging 

Sir Michael Berry is a theoretical physicist at the University of Bristol, where he has been for more than twice as long as he has not. His research centres on the relations between physical theories at different levels of description (classical and quantum physics, ray optics and wave optics…). In addition to these deeply mathematical, often geometric, studies, he also delights in finding familiar phenomena illustrating deep concepts – the arcane in the mundane: rainbows, the sparkling of the sun on the sea, twinkling starlight, polarized light in the sky, tidal bores…

Speech Title: Coming soon.

Mark Brongersma is the Stephen Harris Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He received his PhD from the FOM-Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1998. From 1998-2001 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. His current research is directed toward the development and physical analysis of nanostructured materials that find application in nanoscale optoelectronic devices. He coined the terms Plasmonics and Mie-tronics for the fields of science and technology that aim to manipulate light with metallic and high-index nanostructures. He has authored\co-authored over 250 publications, including papers in Science, Nature Photonics, Nature Materials, and Nature Nanotechnology. He is a highly-cited researcher as identified by Clarivate Analytics and has an h-factor of 97 according to Google Scholar. He was a founder of Rolith Inc that was acquired by Metamaterials Technology Inc in 2016. He also holds a number of patents in the area of nanophotonics. Brongersma received a National Science Foundation Career Award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, the International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (Physics) for his work on plasmonics, and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the SPIE, and the American Physical Society.

Speech Title: Flat Optics for Dynamic Wavefront Manipulation.

Professor Nikolay Zheludev FRS NAE, is Deputy Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton and directs the Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is also a fellow at the Halger Institute for Advanced Study, Texas A&M University, USA. His research interests are in nanophotonics, metamaterials and nonlinear optics. His is a fellow of the Royal Society of London and Member of the United States of America National Academy of Engineering. His personal awards include the IOP Thomas Young medal and Michael Faraday Gold medal, the President of Singapore Science and Technology Award and the IPS President Gold medal.

Speech Title: Optical Topological Metrology with Sub-atomic Resolution

Ido is an Associate Professor at the Technion. In his PhD research, Ido discovered new classes of accelerating beams in nonlinear optics and electromagnetism, for which he received the 2014 American Physical Society (APS) Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Laser Science. Ido was the first Israeli to win an APS award for his PhD thesis. As a postdoc at MIT, he established the foundations of macroscopic quantum electrodynamics (MQED) for photonic quasiparticles and used it to enable forbidden electronic transitions in atoms. As a faculty member, Ido created a paradigm shift in the understanding of free-electron radiation, connecting it to the field of quantum optics. He performed the first experiment on electron microscopy with quantum light, demonstrating that the quantum statistics of photons can be imprinted on the electron. For his achievements as a faculty member, Ido was recently elected to the Israeli Young Academy, which includes 32 young Israeli faculty members below the age of 45. He has won multiple awards and grants, including the ERC Starting Grant, the Krill Prize, and the 2022 Schmidt Science Polymath Award. Ido is the laureate of the 2021 Blavatnik Award in Physical Sciences & Engineering in Israel, and the recipient of the 2022 Adolph Lomb Medal, the top international award for a young scientist in the field of optics.

Speech Title: Free-Electron Quantum Optics.

Luis Liz-Marzán is an Ikerbasque Professor at CIC biomaGUNE (BRTA), in San Sebastián (Spain), where he also served as Scientific Director from 2012 to 2020. Luis graduated in chemistry from the University of Santiago de Compostela, was postdoc at Utrecht University and Professor at the University of Vigo (1995–2012), where he currently holds a part-time Professor position. Luis has been visiting professor at various research institutions worldwide and received numerous scientific awards and honors. He is also a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, European Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea. He currently serves as an executive editor at ACS Nano, and on the editorial advisory board of several journals including Science, Acc. Mater. Res. and Adv. Funct. Mater. Liz-Marzán is known for his work on the colloidal synthesis and self-assembly of metal nanocrystals, as well as the characterization and application of their plasmonic properties. More recently, his research has broadened into the biomedical applications of plasmonic nanostructures.

Speech Title: Chiral Plasmonics in Colloidal Nanoparticles.

Mortensen is a full professor & VILLUM Investigator in the Center for Polariton-driven Light-Matter Interactions (www.POLIMA.org) and a Chair of Physics in the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, both at the University of Southern Denmark. Previously, he held a full professorship (faculty since 2004) at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). In addition to his MSc (1998) and PhD (2001) degrees from DTU, he holds higher doctoral degrees from University of Copenhagen (Dr. Scient., 2021) and DTU (Dr. Tech., 2006). He is a fellow of APS, OSA, SPIE, IOP, and European Academy of Sciences.

Speech Title: Coming soon.

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John Pendry is a condensed matter theorist and has worked at Imperial College since 1981. He has worked extensively on electronic and structural properties of surfaces developing the theory of low energy diffraction and of electronic surface states. Then he turned his attention to photonic materials this interest led to his present research into the remarkable electromagnetic properties of materials where the normal response to electromagnetic fields is reversed, leading to negative values for the refractive index. In collaboration with scientists at Marconi he designed a series of metamaterials, completely novel materials with properties not found in nature. These designs were subsequently the basis for new concepts with radical consequences, such as the first material with a negative refractive index, the concept of a perfect lens, and a prototype cloaking device, which have both caught the imagination of the world’s media. More recently his interests have focussed on time dependent media where he and his collaborators have uncovered new conservation laws relating to lines of force in amplified fields and conservation of photon number.

Speech Title: Coming soon.

Romain Quidant is a Professor at ETH Zurich and the director of the Nanophotonic Systems Laboratory (https://light.ethz.ch). His primary expertise is in the field of Nanophotonics, at the interface between Photonics and Nanotechnology. The research activities of his laboratory are highly interdisciplinary, using the unique properties of nanophotonics systems as an enabling tool to address open questions in different disciplines of science, all the way from fundamental to applied research and innovation. Quidant made pioneering contributions to different subfields of Photonics, including nanoplasmonic tweezers, thermoplasmonics, on-chip biosensing and levitation optomechanics. For his scientific achievements, he received numerous awards and recognitions, including the European Physical Society’s Fresnel Prize, the prize from the International Commission for Optics and was elected Optica (formerly OSA) Fellow.

Speech Title: Coming soon.

Marin Soljačić received a BsE degree in physics and a BsE degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1996. He earned his PhD in physics at Princeton University in 2000. In September 2000, he was named an MIT Pappalardo Fellow in Physics, and in 2003 was appointed as a Principal Research Scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. In September 2005, he became an Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT, in July 2010 an Associate Professor of Physics at MIT, and in July 2011 a Full Professor of Physics. He is a founder of WiTricity Corporation (2007), LuxLabs (2017), as well as Lightelligence (2017). His main research interests are in artificial intelligence as well as electromagnetic phenomena, focusing on nanophotonics, non-linear optics, and wireless power transfer. He is a co-author of more than 200 scientific articles, more than 100 issued US patents, and he has been invited to give more than 100 invited talks at conferences and universities around the world. He is a recipient of the Adolph Lomb medal from the Optical Society of America (2005), and the TR35 award of the Technology Review magazine (2006). In 2008, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship “genius” grant. He is an international member of the Croatian Academy of Engineering since 2009. In 2011 he became a Young Global Leader (YGL) of the World Economic Forum. In 2014, he was awarded Blavatnik National Award, as well as Invented Here! (Boston Patent Law Association). In 2017, he was awarded "The Order of the Croatian Daystar, with the image of Ruđer Bošković", the Croatian President’s top medal for Science. In 2017, the Croatian President also awarded him with "The Order of the Croatian Interlace" medal. He was also Highly Cited Researcher according to WoS for 2019,2020,2021&2022.

Speech Title: Coming soon.