Jeremy J. Baumberg

Jeremy J. Baumberg FRS directs a UK Nano-Photonics Centre at the University of Cambridge and has extensive experience in developing optical materials structured on the nano-scale that can be assembled in large volume. He is also Director of the Cambridge Nano Doctoral Training Centre, a key UK site for training PhD students in interdisciplinary Nano research. Strong experience with Hitachi, IBM, his own spin-offs Mesophotonics and Base4, as well as strong industrial engagement give him a unique position to combine academic insight with industry application in a two-way flow. With over 20000 citations, he is a leading innovator in Nano. This has led to awards of the IoP Faraday gold Medal (2017), Royal Society Rumford Medal (2014), IoP Young Medal (2013), Royal Society Mullard Prize (2005), the IoP Charles Vernon Boys Medal (2000) and the IoP Mott Lectureship (2005). He frequently talks on NanoScience to the media, and is a strategic advisor on NanoTechnology to the UK Research Councils. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Optical Society of America, and the Institute of Physics. His recent popular science book "The Secret Life of Science: How Science Really Works and Why it Matters" is just published by PUP, see np.phy.cam.ac.uk.

Alexandra Boltasseva

Alexandra Boltasseva is a Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with courtesy appointment in Materials Engineering at Purdue University. She received her PhD in electrical engineering at Technical University of Denmark, DTU in 2004. Boltasseva specializes in nanophotonics, quantum photonics, and optical materials. She is the 2023 recipient of the R.W. Wood Prize (Optica, formerly Optical Society of America), 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, 2018 Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists Finalist and received the 2013 Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Photonics Society Young Investigator Award, 2013 Materials Research Society (MRS) Outstanding Young Investigator Award, the 2011 MIT Technology Review Top Young Innovator (TR35), the 2009 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 (2008). She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), MRS, IEEE, Optica, and SPIE. She served on MRS Board of Directors and is former Editor-in-Chief for Optical Materials Express journal.

Rachel Grange

Since 2025, Rachel Grange has been appointed Full Professor of Photonics at ETH Zurich. She has been Associate Professor and Assistant Professor in the field of integrated optics and nonlinear nanophotonics in the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich since 2015. From 2011 to 2014, she was junior group leader at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her research covers material investigations at the nanoscale, top-down and bottom-up fabricated nanostructures with metal-oxides, mainly thin film lithium niobate and solution processed barium titanate for classical and quantum devices. Recently, she worked on integrated electro-optic spectrometers, on random quasi-phase matching phenomena in complex assemblies of nanocrystals, and parametric down conversion signals for quantum information processing.

Ruwen Peng

Ruwen Peng is a distinguished professor in the School of Physics, Nanjing University, and a principal investigator at the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, China. She received Ph.D. degree in condensed matter physics from Nanjing University in 1998. Her research interests span nanophotonics, metamaterials and plasmonics, photonic quasicrystals, phononic transport, and nanoscale heat transfer. Recently, she and her collaborators have advanced polarization manipulation and multiplexing with optical metasurfaces in both classical and quantum regimes. By introducing engineered noise, they broke the limitation of polarization multiplexing with an optical metasurface. They also demonstrated the transformation and multichannel distribution of entangled photon pairs based on metasurfaces. She received National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars by NSF of China in 2006, the Chinese Young Women Scientists' Award in 2011, and Xie Xide Award from the Chinese Physical Society in 2013. She has been serving as the Deputy Director of the Committee for Micro/Nano Photonics of the Chinese Optical Society since 2016, the Vice Chair in Women in Physics Working Group of Chinese Physical Society (WIP, China-Beijing) since 2011, and a member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Working Group 5 since 2022.

Ali Adibi

Ali Adibi is the director of Bio and Environmental Sensing Technologies (BEST) and a professor and Joseph M. Pettit chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also a member of the Winship Cancer Research Center at the Emory University. His research group has pioneered several structures in the field of integrated nanophotonics for both information processing and sensing. He has also pioneered new sensing solutions for medical diagnosis as well as AI algorithms for diagnosis and prognosis in medicine. He is the author of more than 260 journal papers and 600 conference papers. He has served as the editor, conference chair, and technical committee members in over 30 different conferences and journals. He has also led several multidisciplinary research teams in the areas of integrated optics and metaphotonics for sensing, interconnection, and imaging. He is the recipient of several awards including Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, Packard Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, and the SPIE Technology Achievement Award. He is also a fellow of OSA, SPIE, and AAAS.

Robert W. Boyd

Robert W. Boyd received the B.S. degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Ph.D. degree in physics in 1977 from the University of California at Berkeley. His Ph.D. thesis was supervised by Charles Townes and involved the use of nonlinear optical techniques in infrared detection for astronomy. Professor Boyd joined the faculty of the Institute of Optics of the University of Rochester in 1977 and in July 2001 he became the M. Parker Givens Professor of Optics. In 2010, he became Professor of Physics and Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Nonlinear Optics at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include studies of nonlinear optical interactions, studies of the nonlinear optical properties of materials, the development of photonic devices including photonic biosensors, and studies of the quantum statistical properties of nonlinear optical interactions. Professor Boyd has written two books, co-edited two anthologies, published over 200 research papers, and has been awarded five patents. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the American Physical Society and is the past chair of the Division of Laser Science of the American Physical Society.

Rob Devlin

Rob Devlin is co-founder and CEO of Metalenz. He earned a joint BS/MS in Electrical Engineering and Materials Science from Drexel University and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, where he worked in the lab of Federico Capasso. His research has spanned the topics of nanofabrication, nanophotonics and materials science. He has authored or co-authored many frequently cited papers, one of which was selected as the cover of Science Journal and voted one of Science’s 10 breakthroughs of the year. These publications have provided critical advances in the field including the first demonstration of high efficiency metasurfaces throughout the visible spectrum. His company, Metalenz is the first to bring metasurface technology to mass markets, with more than 150 million metasurface optics integrated into consumer devices for 3D sensing, replacing conventional lens stacks. In 2025, Devlin received Optica’s Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award for his foundational contributions to metasurface design, leadership in commercialization, and development of the first polarization sensor for consumer applications.

Yuri Kivshar

Yuri Kivshar received PhD degree in 1984 in Kharkov (Ukraine). He left the Soviet Union in 1989 and after several visiting positions in Europe, he settled in Australia in 1993. He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science since 2002, and also Fellow of Optica, APS, SPIE, and IOP. He received many awards, more recently 2022 Max Born Award (Optica, former OSA) and 2025 ZEISS Research Award (Germany). His research interests include nonlinear physics, metamaterials, and nanophotonics.

Franco Nori

Franco Nori is a Chief Scientist at RIKEN, with a concurrent position at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois, and afterwards became a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara. His research group has done pioneering interdisciplinary studies at the interface between nanoscience, photonics, quantum optics, dissipative quantum open systems, quantum information processing, superconducting quantum circuitry, opto-mechanics, and condensed matter physics. He has been listed by the Web of Science as a "Highly Cited Researcher” (less than 0.1% are selected) in Physics for the past seven consecutive years: from 2017 to 2023. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Physics Society (APS), Institute of Physics (IoP), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Optical Society of America (OSA) [this last one “for fundamental contributions to quantum information science and optics, including circuit quantum electrodynamics, and the interface between quantum optics and quantum circuits”]. He received the 2014 Prize for Research in Physics, from the Matsuo Foundation, Japan; and the 2013 Prize for Science, by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. Also, an "Excellence in Research Award" and an "Excellence in Education Award" from the University of Michigan. He is an Elected Member of the Academia Europaea, the Latin American Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Swedish Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, in Gothenburg, Sweden. He won the 2023 W.E. Lamb Medal, and the 2024 Charles H. Townes Medal (from the OSA), both for research on Quantum Optics, Quantum Electronics and Quantum Information.

Hiromi Okamoto

Hiromi Okamoto is a professor of chemistry at Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Japan. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Tokyo. He then worked at Institute for Molecular Science and The University of Tokyo as a Research Associate and later as an Associate Professor. He earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1991, during which time he conducted ultrafast and vibrational spectroscopic studies. Since 2000, he has been a professor at Institute for Molecular Science, where his research focuses primarily on nano- and microscopic optical imaging of materials, plasmonic and chiral materials, and related phenomena in chemical and materials sciences.

John Pendry

John Pendry has worked at the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, since 1981. His research at Imperial College reflects his broad interests in physics but has recently concentrated on optics and electromagnetism in general. In collaboration with scientists at The Marconi Company he designed a series of ‘metamaterials’ whose properties owed more to their micro-structure than to the constituent materials. The metamaterial concept caught on and now is a major topic not only of research activity, but also of application to 5G and 6G network technology, MRI, satellite communications and much else, though popular interest has concentrated on his design for a cloak of invisibility.

Vladimir M. Shalaev

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, optical metamaterials and quantum photonics. Prof. Shalaev has received several awards for his research, including the APS Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids, the Optica (formerly, Optical Society of America) Max Born Award 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, and the OSA and SPIE Goodman Book Writing Award. Prof. Shalaev is recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher in physics by the Web of Science Group for 7 consecutive years, in 2017-2023. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, APS, SPIE, MRS and Optica.

Olga Smirnova

Olga Smirnova graduated from the Physics Department of the Moscow State University in 1996 and received her PhD there in 2000, continuing as assistant professor. In 2003 she received the Lise-Meitner Fellowship of Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and joined the Vienna University of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2005 she moved to the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, Canada, where she became a permanent staff scientist in 2006. In 2009 she received the SAW award of the Leibniz society and moved to the Max Born Institute to establish her own Strong Field Theory research group, which she continues to lead. Since 2016 she also holds full professorship at the Technical University Berlin. In 2010 Olga has received the Karl-Scheel-Preis of Physikalischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin, in 2020 she has received the Ahmed Zewail Award in Ultrafast Science & Technology of the American Chemical Society and in 2022 Mildred Dresselhaus Prize and Guest Professorship at Hamburg University. Olga’s current research focuses on imaging and control of ultrafast electron dynamics in atoms, solid state materials, and molecules, especially chiral molecules. Her research has been recently supported by the Horizon Europe ERC advanced grant.

Jelena Vuckovic

Jelena Vuckovic (PhD Caltech 2002) is the Jensen Huang Professor of Global Leadership, Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Applied Physics at Stanford. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. Her awards include the Zeiss Award, Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Geoffrey Frew Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Sciences, the IET A. F. Harvey Engineering Research Prize, Mildred Dresselhaus Lectureship from MIT, and the Humboldt Prize. She is a Fellow of the APS, Optica, and IEEE, a lead editor of Physical Review Applied, and a co-founder and a lead scientific advisor of SPINS Photonics.

Eli Yablonovitch

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 29.1% efficiency; dual-junction 31.5%; quadruple-junction 38.8% efficiency; all at 1 sun. His startup company Ethertronics Inc., has shipped over 2 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

Nikolay Zheludev's research interest are in nanophotonics and metamaterials. He is the Deputy Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre in Southampton University, UK. 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.