Our history
From Marrakesh to Niagara Falls
META traces its origins to Bianisotropics 2002, held in Marrakesh — one of the earliest international conferences devoted to advanced electromagnetic materials. That meeting welcomed Prof. Victor G. Veselago, whose theory of negative-index media laid the foundations of modern electromagnetic metamaterials. The same year, META’s founding chair Prof. Said Zouhdi co-edited Advances in Electromagnetics of Complex Media and Metamaterials (Springer, NATO Science Series) — recognized as the first international scientific book to carry “Metamaterials” in its title, and containing a chapter by Veselago himself, Electrodynamics of Media with Simultaneously Negative Electric Permittivity and Magnetic Permeability. As the discipline took shape, the meeting became META, whose first edition returned to Marrakesh in 2008.
Across sixteen editions, META has welcomed more than 10,000 researchers from over 50 countries, and established a global community spanning Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.
