Andrea Alù

Andrea Alù is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), the Founding Director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and the Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Laurea (2001) and PhD (2007) from the University of Roma Tre, Italy, and, after a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 2009, where he was the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor until Jan. 2018. Dr. Alù is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Materials Research Society (MRS), Optica, the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) and the American Physical Society (APS). He is the President of Metamorphose, a Highly Cited Researcher since 2017, a Simons Investigator in Physics, the director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Wave Phenomena Based on Symmetries, and the Editor in Chief of Optical Materials Express. He has received several scientific awards, including the NSF Alan T. Waterman award, the Blavatnik National Award for Physical Sciences and Engineering, the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, the ICO Prize in Optics, the OSA Adolph Lomb Medal, and the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal.

Nader Engheta

Nader Engheta is the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvaniain Philadelphia with affiliations in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Bioengineering, and Materials Science and Engineering. He received his BS degree from the University of Tehran, and his MS and Ph.D. degrees from Caltech. His current research activities span a broad range of areas including optics, metamaterials, electrodynamics, microwaves, photonics, nano-optics, graphene photonics, imaging and sensing inspired by eyes of animal species, microwave and optical antennas, and physics and engineering of fields and waves. He has received several awards for his research including the 2023 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering, Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023), Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award (2023), the 2020 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics (UK), the 2020 Max Born Award from the OPTICA (formerly Optical Society), the 2019 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the 2018 IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology, the 2022 Hermann Anton Haus Lecture at MIT, the 2015 SPIE Gold Medal, the 2014 Balthasar van der Pol Gold Medal from the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the 2017 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, the Canadian Academy of Engineeringas an International Fellow the Fellow of US National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the IEEE Electromagnetics Award, the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship Awardfrom DoD, the Wheatstone Lecture in King’s College London, 2006 Scientific American Magazine 50 Leaders in Science and Technology, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Fellow of nine international scientificand technical organizations, i.e., IEEE, OPTICA, APS, MRS, SPIE, URSI, AAAS, IOP and NAI. He has received the honorary doctoral degrees from the Aalto University in Finland in 2016, the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 2016, and Ukraine’s National Technical University Kharkov Polytechnic Institute in 2017.

Sylvain Gigan

Sylvain Gigan is professor of physics at Sorbonne Université in Paris and group leader in Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel at Ecole Normale Supérieure. His research interests range from fundamental investigations of light propagation in complex media, biomedical imaging, computational imaging, and signal processing, to quantum optics and quantum information in complex media. After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau France) in 2000 and a Master specialization in optics from University Paris XI (Orsay, France), he obtained a PhD in physics in 2004 from University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris, France) in quantum and non-linear Optics. From 2004 to 2007, he was a postdoctoral researcher in Vienna University (Austria). from 2007 to 2014, he was at ESPCI ParisTech as Associate Professor, and started working on optical imaging in complex media and wavefront shaping techniques, at the Langevin Institute. Dr. Gigan is also the cofounder of a spin-off called LightOn (www.lighton.ai), aiming at performing optical computing for machine learning and big data. He was awarded the Fabry de Gramont Prize of the French Optical Society in 2016, The Joseph Fourier ATOS prize in 2018, the Jean Jerphagnon Prize in 2019.

Marin Soljačić

Marin Soljačić is a Professor of Physics at MIT. 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 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.

Isabelle Staude

Isabelle Staude is professor at the Institute of Solid State Physics at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. She studied physics at the University of Konstanz, Germany, received her Ph.D. degree from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2011, and spent several years as a postdoc at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She received an Emmy-Noether Grant from the German Research Foundation and the Hertha Sponer Prize 2017 from the German Physical Society. She is a member of the German Young Academy (Junge Akademie) and a Fellow of the Max Planck School of Photonics.

Jelena Vuckovic

Jelena Vuckovic (PhD Caltech 2002) is the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership in the School of Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy of Applied Physics at Stanford, where she leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. She is also the Fortinet Founders Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford, and was the inaugural director of Q-FARM, the Stanford-SLAC Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative. Vuckovic has received many awards and honors including recently the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2022), the Mildred Dresselhaus Lectureship from MIT (2021), the James Gordon Memorial Speakership from the OSA (2020), the IET A. F. Harvey Engineering Research Prize (2019), Distinguished Scholarship of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (2019), the Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Munich (2013), and Humboldt Prize (2010). She is a Fellow of the APS, of the Optica (OSA), and of the IEEE, and an associate editor of the ACS Photonics.

Harry Atwater

Harry Atwater is the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. Atwater’s scientific effort focuses on nanophotonic light-matter interactions. His work spans fundamental nanophotonic phenomena and applications, including active wavefront shaping of light using metasurfaces, optical propulsion of lightsails, quantum and 2D nanophotonics as well as solar energy conversion.

Atwater was an early pioneer in nanophotonics and plasmonics and gave a name to the field of plasmonics in 2001. He is Chair of the LightSail Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot program. Currently Atwater is also the Director for the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), a Department of Energy Hub program for solar fuels, and was also the founding Editor in Chief of the journal ACS Photonics. Atwater is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher, and the recipient of the 2021 von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society.

Alexandra Boltasseva

Purdue University, USA

Alexandra Boltasseva is a Professor at the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Purdue University. She received her PhD in electrical engineering at Technical University of Denmark, DTU in 2004. Boltasseva specializes in nanophotonics, nanofabrication, optical materials, plasmonics and metamaterials. She is 2018 Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists Finalist and received the 2013 IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award, 2013 Materials Research Society (MRS) Outstanding Young Investigator Award, the MIT Technology Review Top Young Innovator (TR35), the Young Researcher Award in Advanced Optical Technologies from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and the Young Elite-Researcher Award from the Danish Council for Independent Research. She is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and Fellow of SPIE. She served on MRS Board of Directors and is Editor-in-Chief for OSA’s Optical Materials Express.

Mark Brongersma

Stanford University, USA

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. He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark in 2022. 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 is a highly-cited researcher as identified by Clarivate Analytics. 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 OPTICA, MRS, SPIE, and APS.

Demetrios Christodoulides

University of Southern California, USA

Demetrios Christodoulides is an Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1986. After earning his doctorate degree, he joined Bellcore as a postdoctoral research fellow, and was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lehigh University from 1988 to 2002. Between 2002 and 2022 he was a Pegasus Professor and the Cobb Family Endowed Chair at CREOL–The College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida. Christodoulides’ contributions have been in the general field of optics and photonics. Among them is the first prediction of discrete self-trapped states in optical lattices, Bragg solitons in nonlinear gratings, vector solitons, and the development of the theory describing nonlinear optical interactions in soft matter and biological colloidal systems. His group proposed and demonstrated optical accelerating beams, which today find applications in microscopy and nonlinear optics. In the last ten years or so, his work has focused on the ramifications and applications of some special symmetries in optics, such as those of parity-time symmetry and supersymmetry. Most recently he has been exploring new theoretical avenues in describing the complex dynamics of highly multimode nonlinear photonic systems by means of optical thermodynamics. He has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics and JOSA B. He is a Fellow of APS and Optica. He is the recipient of the Optica’s 2011 R.W. Wood Prize and 2018 Max Born Award, and of the 2023 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science of APS.

Javier García de Abajo

ICFO-Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, Spain

Javier García de Abajo received his PhD from the University of the Basque Country in 1993 and then visited Berkeley National Lab for three years. He was a Research Professor at the Spanish CSIC and in 2013 moved to ICFO-Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques (Barcelona) as an ICREA Research Professor and Group Leader. He is Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, and he has co-authored 300+ articles on different aspects of nanophotonics, atomic physics, surface science, and electron microscope spectroscopies. See http://www.nanophotonics.es for more details.

Wolfgang Fritzsche

Leibniz Institute for Photonic Technology, Germany

Wolfgang Fritzsche is heading the Nanobiophotonics Department at the Leibniz Institute for Photonic Technology (IPHT) in Jena, Germany. His scientific interest is in localized surface plasmon resonance, focused on novel effects in the interaction of molecular components with plasmonic nanostructures, with a special emphasis on biosensing. Here, multiplexed assays based on imaging spectrometry readout are targeted, in order to allow for the paralleled monitoring of molecular binding reactions for potential bioanalytical applications.

Sven Höfling

University of Würzburg, Germany

Sven Höfling received his diploma degree in Applied Physics from the University of Applied Science in Coburg and his Ph.D. degree from Würzburg University. He was with the Fraunhofer Institute of Applied Solid-State Physics, Freiburg, Germany from 2001 to 2002 working on blue and white light emitting diodes. In 2003, he joint Würzburg University for his Ph.D. work on single mode emitting GaAs/AlGaAs quantum cascade lasers. From 2006 to 2013, he was head of the Optoelectronic Materials and Devices Group at Technische Physik, Würzburg University. Sven Höfling was a full professor at the University of St Andrews, Scotland from 2013 to 2021. In 2015 he rejoint the University of Würzburg, Germany as a professor of physics and as the Head of the Chair of Applied Physics and the Gottfried-Landwehr-Laboratory for Nanotechnologies. He is running a 550 sqm clean room with a full chain of semiconductor growth, processing and characterization tools. His research interests include the design, fabrication, and characterization of low-dimensional electronic and photonic nanostructures, including quantum wells and quantum dots, organic semiconductors, high-quality factor microcavities, photonic crystal devices, semiconductor lasers, organic optoelectronics and topological photonics.

Dr. Höfling is a member of German Physical Society (DPG), a Senior member of IEEE and SPIE, and a fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP) and Optica.

Jiří Homola

Institute of Photonics and Electronics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic

Jiří Homola is Deputy Director and the Head of Optical Biosensors research group at the Institute of Photonics and Electronics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD (1993) from the Czech Academy of Sciences. From 1993 to 1997 he worked at the Institute of Photonics and Electronics, Prague as a Research Scientist. From 1997 to 2002 he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle (USA), since 2001 as a Research Associate Professor. From 2003, he has been with the Institute of Photonics and Electronics in Prague and has been responsible for the optical biosensors research program. In 2009, he received his DSc. degree in technical sciences from the Czech Academy of Sciences and in 2014 he became Professor of physics at Charles University in Prague. From 2009 to 2019, he was Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research interests are in photonics and biophotonics, in particular in optical sensors and biosensors. He investigates photonic and plasmonic phenomena and pursues the development of sensor instrumentation, microfluidic devices, and functional coatings for optical biosensors for molecular biology, medical diagnostics, food safety, and security. He has received the Roche Diagnostics Prize for Sensor Technology, Award for Outstanding Research of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic, among other awards. He has been elected Fellow of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic and Fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE). He serves as associate editor of Biosensors and Bioelectronics (Elsevier).

Guoliang Huang

University of Missouri-Columbia, USA

Guoliang Huang is currently a Huber and Helen Croft Chair professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at University of Missouri-Columbia. He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. Dr. Huang’s research interests include wave propagation and mechanics in elastic/acoustic metamaterials and structural materials, topological and active mechanics, structural dynamics, vibration and sound wave mitigation. Dr. Huang’s research has been funded by NSF, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, DURIP, Department of Energy, NASA, and major industries. He has authored one book, six book chapters and more than 160 journal papers.

Mercedeh Khajavikhan

University of Southern California, USA

Mercedeh Khajavikhan is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. She has also a joint appointment at the Department of Physics & Astronomy at USC. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2009. Subsequently, she joined the University of California in San Diego as a postdoctoral researcher, where she worked on the design and development of nanolasers, plasmonic devices, and silicon photonics components. Prior to joining USC, she was a faculty at the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) at the University of Central Florida (UCF), working primarily on unraveling novel phenomena in active photonic platforms. She is the recipient of the NSF Early CAREER Award in 2015, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2016, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2018, the University of Central Florida Reach for the Stars Award in 2017, UCF Luminary Award in 2018, and DARPA Director’s Fellowship in 2020. She is a fellow of Optica (formerly known as Optical Society of America OSA).

Tobias J. Kippenberg

EPFL, Switzerland

Tobias J. Kippenberg is Full Professor in the Institute of Physics and Electrical Engineering at EPFL in Switzerland since 2013 and joined EPFL in 2008 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor. Prior to EPFL, he was Independent Max Planck Junior Research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. While at the MPQ he demonstrated radiation pressure cooling of optical micro-resonators, and developed techniques with which mechanical oscillators can be cooled, measured and manipulated in the quantum regime that are now part of the research field of Cavity Quantum Optomechanics. Moreover, his group discovered the generation of optical frequency combs using high Q micro-resonators, a principle known now as micro-combs or Kerr combs.

For his early contributions in these two research fields, he has been recipient of the EFTF Award for Young Scientists (2011), The Helmholtz Prize in Metrology (2009), the EPS Fresnel Prize (2009), ICO Award (2014), Swiss Latsis Prize (2015), as well as the Wilhelmy Klung Research Prize in Physics (2015), the 2018 ZEISS Research Award and 2020 OSA R. Wood Award. Moreover, he is 1st prize recipient of the "8th European Union Contest for Young Scientists" in 1996 and is listed in the Highly Cited Researchers List of 1% most cited Physicists in 2014-2019. He is founder of the startup LIGENTEC SA, an integrated photonics foundry.

Naoto Nagaosa

RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), Japan

Naoto Nagaosa was born in Hyogo Prefecture in 1958, and graduated from Department of Applied physics, The University of Tokyo in 1980. From 1983 to 1986, he was a research associate in Institute for Solid State Physics, Univ. Tokyo, and received a D.Sci from Univ. Tokyo in 1986. From 1988 to 1990, he worked as a visiting scientist at Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining the Department of Applied Physics in Univ. Tokyo, where he is now a professor. From 2013 he has joint appointment with the Deputy Director of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS). He is now serving as Senior Advisory Group (SAG) Scientist of APCTP, and also the chairman of c5 commission (Low Temperature Physics) of IUPAP.

His research field is theoretical condensed-matter physics, especially involving the strong electron correlation, optical responses of solids, topological aspects of condensed matter, and superconductivity.

For his accomplishments, he has received the Yukawa Prize, Japan IBM Prize, Nissan Science Prize, Nishina Memorial Prize, Fujihara Prize, Purple Ribbon, Benjamin Lee Professorship, and is now a Foreign member of National Academy of Science.

Dragomir Neshev

Australian National University, Australia

Dragomir Neshev is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) and a Professor in Physics at the Australian National University (ANU). He received a PhD degree from Sofia University, Bulgaria in 1999. Since then, he has worked in the field of optics at several research centres around the world and joined ANU in 2002. He is the recipient of several awards and honours, including a Highly Cited Researcher (Web of Science, 2022 and 2021), a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship (ARC, 2010), and a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship (European Commission, 2001). His activities span over several branches of optics, including periodic photonic structures, singular optics, plasmonics, and optical metasurfaces.

Sir John Pendry

Imperial College London, UK

John Pendry is a condensed matter theorist working at Imperial College London. His early work addressed electronic and structural properties of surfaces developing the theory of low energy diffraction, EXAFS, and of electronic surface states later moving on to studies of transport in disordered systems. In the mid 1990's he turned his attention to metamaterials and proposed several structures which radically influenced the development of the field leading to the experimental discovery of negative refraction by the Smith group and later, also in collaboration with David Smith, the design of a cloak of invisibility. His investigation of negative refraction led to the discovery that it is theoretically possible to design a lens whose resolution is limited only by the perfection of manufacture, not by the well known Abbé law which limits resolution to the order of the wavelength. The technique of transformation optics which he pioneered has led to many applications in the field of plasmonics, particularly building on the perfect lens concept and showing how to concentrate light into sub nanoscale volumes. His most recent work moves the study of metamaterials on to structures that vary in time as well as in space, invoking quantum aspects of metamaterials.

Luca Razzari

Centre Energie, Matériaux et Télécommunications (INRS-EMT), Canada

Luca Razzari is a Full Professor at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique – Centre Energie, Matériaux et Télécommunications (INRS-EMT) in Montreal, Canada, since 2020. He received his Laurea (2001) and PhD (2004) degrees from the University of Pavia, Italy. He completed part of his PhD research at Institut d’Optique in Orsay, France (2004). He then had three postdoctoral experiences: from 2005 to 2006, he worked at the Institute for Complex Systems (CNR-ISC) in Rome, Italy. From 2006 to 2010, he made his first move to Canada as a Marie Curie Fellow at INRS-EMT. From 2010 to 2012, he was with the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, Italy. In November 2012, he finally joined the INRS-EMT as a junior faculty member. Dr. Razzari’s research interests include nanoscale light-matter interactions, metasurfaces, nonlinear optics, as well as terahertz science and technology. He has been recently elected a Fellow of Optica (2023).

Mikael Rechtsman

Pennsylvania State University, USA

Mikael Rechtsman is an Associate Professor of Physics at the Pennsylvania State University in the US. His research group studies different aspects of nonlinear optics and photonics, with a focus on topological structures and devices. He is the recipient of the Packard and Sloan Fellowships, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the ICO prize of the International Commission of Optics.

Moti Segev

Technion, Israel

Moti Segev is the Robert J. Shillman Distinguished Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, at the Technion, Israel. His interests are mainly in photonics, solitons, lasers, and quantum optics. He won numerous international awards, among them the 2007 Quantum Electronics Prize of the EPS, the 2009 Max Born Award of the OSA, and the 2014 Arthur Schawlow Prize of the APS. In 2011, he was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences, in 2015 to the National Academy of Science of the USA. In 2014 he won the Israel Prize (highest honor in Israel). Above all his achievements, Moti takes pride in the success of his graduate students and postdocs, among them are currently 23 professors in the USA, Germany, Taiwan, Croatia, Italy, India, China and Israel, and many holding senior R&D positions in the industry.

Vladimir M. Shalaev

Purdue University, USA

Vladimir M. Shalaev, Scientific Director for Nanophotonics at Birck Nanotechnology Center and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, specializes in nanophotonics, plasmonics, and optical metamaterials. Vladimir M. Shalaev has received several awards for his research in the field of nanophotonics and metamaterials, including the Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America for his pioneering contributions to the field of optical metamaterials, the Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics, IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, Rolf Landauer medal of the ETOPIM (Electrical, Transport and Optical Properties of Inhomogeneous Media) International Association, the UNESCO Medal for the development of nanosciences and nanotechnologies, OSA and SPIE Goodman Book Writing Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, APS, SPIE, MRS and OSA. Prof. Shalaev has authored three books, thirty invited book chapters and over 500 research publications.

Kerry Vahala

California Institute of Technology, USA

Kerry Vahala is Professor of Applied Physics at Caltech and holds the Jenkins Chair in Information Science and Technology. His research on chip-based high-Q optical resonators and related low-power nonlinear optical devices has advanced miniature frequency and time systems, microwave sources, parametric oscillators, astrocombs and gyroscopes. Vahala also made early contributions to the subject of cavity optomechanics and demonstrations of chip-based devices to cavity QED phenomena. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the IEEE and Optica, he received the IEEE Sarnoff Medal for research on quantum-well laser dynamics, the Alexander von Humboldt award and MPQ Distinguished Scholar Award for work on ultra-high-Q optical microcavities, a NASA achievement award for application of microcombs to exoplanet detection, and the Optica Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award for a 2-photon optical clock. Vahala is the Executive Officer of the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Caltech.

Xiangrong Wang

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Xiangrong Wang is a full professor in the physics department of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He obtained his PhD in 1990 from University of Rochester and joined the Physics Department of HKUST in 1992. Professor Wang is a condensed matter theorist and is interested in revealing the physics principles behind the novel physics phenomena. Currently, he is working on the interplay of charges, spins, and phonons in nano-systems and devices. His current research focus on topological states of matter, magnetization dynamics, and spin/charge transport. The research topics include skyrmion physics, magnonics, magnetic domain wall motion, spin current generation and detection, and magneto-effects.

Martin Wegener

KIT, Germany

Martin Wegener is Professor at the Institute of Applied Physics at KIT and one of the Directors of the Institute of Nanotechnology at KIT. He is also spokesperson of the Excellence Cluster “3D Matter Made to Order”. He initiated (2006) and co-founded (2007) the company Nanoscribe GmbH. His current research interests are in 3D additive manufacturing driven towards the nanometer scale and applications thereof, for example in 3D metamaterials.

Gary Wiederrecht

Argonne National Laboratory, USA

Gary Wiederrecht is currently the Deputy Division Director and Senior Scientist in the Nanoscience & Technology (NST) Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received a B.S. degree in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1987 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from MIT in 1992. He moved to Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow in 1992, working with Michael Wasielewski on molecular photonics, and became a scientific staff member in 1995. His research interests center on the photochemistry and photophysics of hybrid nanostructures, photochemical energy conversion, quantum science, biomimetic materials, and the ultrafast optical responses of nanoparticles and nanoparticle assemblies. He is also working to develop novel approaches to time-resolved optical microscopy and imaging applications. He has received an R&D100 award, the DOE Young Scientist Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the Argonne National Laboratory Distinguished Service Award. He has authored or co-authored approximately 165 peer-reviewed research articles and has several patents. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Eli Yablonovitch

UC Berkeley, USA

Eli Yablonovitch is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, where he holds the James & Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering. He is the Director of the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), a multi-University Center headquartered at Berkeley.

Prof. Yablonovitch introduced the idea that strained semiconductor lasers could have superior performance due to reduced valence band (hole) effective mass. With almost every human interaction with the internet, optical telecommunication occurs by strained semiconductor lasers. He is regarded as a Father of the Photonic BandGap concept, and he coined the term "Photonic Crystal". The geometrical structure of the first experimentally realized Photonic bandgap, is sometimes called “Yablonovite”. In his photovoltaic research, Yablonovitch introduced the 4(n squared) (“Yablonovitch Limit”) light-trapping factor that is in worldwide use, for almost all commercial solar panels. His mantra that "a great solar cell also needs to be a great LED”, is the basis of the world record solar cells: single-junction 28.8% efficiency; dual-junction 31.5%; quadruple-junction 38.8% efficiency; all at 1 sun. His startup company Ethertronics Inc., has shipped over one billion cellphone antennas.

Prof. Yablonovitch is elected as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. He has been awarded the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society, the Isaac Newton Medal of the UK Institute of Physics, the Rank Prize (UK), the Harvey Prize (Israel), the IEEE Photonics Award, the IET Mountbatten Medal (UK), the Julius Springer Prize (Germany), the R.W. Wood Prize, the W. Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, and the Adolf Lomb Medal. He also has an honorary Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, & the Hong Kong Univ. of Science & Technology, and is honorary Professor at Nanjing University.

Nikolay Zheludev

University of Southampton, UK and NTU, Singapore

Nikolay Zheludev's research interest are in nanophotonics and metamaterials. He is the Deputy Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre in Southampton University, UK and co-Director of The Photonics Institute at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Prof. Zheludev is elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK) and Member of the USA National Academy of Engineering. He is a Fellow of the European Physical Society (EPS), the Optical Society (OSA) and the Institute of Physics (London). He has been awarded the Michael Faraday Gold Medal, Thomas Young Medal and President of Singapore Science and Technology Award.