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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ZheludevNikolay 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.