Andrea Alù

University of Texas at Austin, USA

2016 ACS Photonics Young Investigator Award Winner

Andrea Alù is an Associate Professor and the Cockrell Family Dean’s Chair in Engineering Excellence Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from the University of Roma Tre, Italy, in 2007 and, after a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 2009. His current research interests span over a broad range of areas, including metamaterials and plasmonics, electromagnetics, nano-optics, photonics and acoustics. Dr. Alù has authored and co-authored over 300 journal papers, he is a Fellow of IEEE, OSA, and APS, and has received several scientific awards, including the NSF Alan T. Waterman award (2015), the OSA Adolph Lomb Medal (2013), the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011), and the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Engineering (2016).

Harry Atwater

California Institute of Technology, USA

Harry Atwater is currently Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests center around two interwoven research themes: photovoltaics and solar energy; and plasmonics and optical metamaterials. Atwater and his group have been active in photovoltaics research for more than 20 years. Recently they have created new photovoltaic devices, including silicon wire array solar cells, and transferred-layer designs for III-V semiconductor and multijunction cells. They are making exciting advances in plasmonic light absorber structures for III-V compound and silicon thin films. Atwater is an early pioneer in surface plasmon photonics; he gave the name to the field of plasmonics in 2001. He has authored or co-authored over 200 publications, and his group’s developments in the solar and plasmonics field have been featured in Scientific American and in research papers in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics and Advanced Materials.

Stephen M. Barnett

University of Glasgow, UK

Stephen Barnett studied for both his Bachelors and Doctoral degrees at Imperial College London, receiving his PhD in 1985.  He is currently the Cargill Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.  His  principal field of expertise is in quantum theory, most especially quantum optics and quantum information, but he has very wide research interests including atomic physics, optics, foundations of quantum theory, relativity, low temperature physics and aspects of chiral chemistry.  He has also dabbled in palaeontology.  He is best known for his discovery with David Pegg of the correct form of the quantum phase operator, his  resolution of the long-standing Abraham-Minkowski dilemma concerning he momentum of light in a  medium, and his extensive work with Miles Padgett on the angular momentum of light.  His contributions have been recognised through the awards of the Maxwell Medal (1994) and the Dirac Prize (2013).

Nader Engheta

University of Pennsylvania, USA

Nader Engheta, is the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, with affiliations in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and Bioengineering. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Tehran, and his M.S and Ph.D. degrees from Caltech. He has received several awards for his research including the 2015 Fellow of US National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the 2015 Gold Medal from SPIE (the international society for optics and photonics), the 2015 National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship (NSSEFF) Award from US Department of Defense, the 2015 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award, the 2015 Wheatstone Lecture in King’s College London, the 2014 Balthasar van der Pol Gold Medal from the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the 2013 Inaugural SINA Award in Engineering, the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Key Award, the 2012 IEEE Electromagnetics Award, the 2008 George H. Heilmeier Award for Excellence in Research, the Fulbright Naples Chair Award, NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, the UPS Foundation Distinguished Educator term Chair, 2006 Scientific American Magazine 50 Leaders in Science and Technology, Guggenheim Fellowship, and IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He is a Fellow of six international scientific and technical societies, i.e., IEEE, APS, OSA, MRS, SPIE, and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His current research activities span a broad range of areas including nanophotonics, metamaterials, nano-scale optics, graphene optics, imaging and sensing inspired by eyes of animal species, optical nanoengineering, microwave and optical antennas, and engineering and physics of fields and waves. He has co-edited (with R. W. Ziolkowski) the book entitled “Metamaterials: Physics and Engineering Explorations” by Wiley-IEEE Press, 2006. He was the Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics in June 2012.

Demetrios Christodoulides

University of Central Florida, USA

Demetrios Christodoulides is the Cobb Family Endowed Chair and Pegasus Professor of Optics at CREOL-the College of Optics and Photonics of the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1986 and he subsequently joined Bellcore as a post-doctoral fellow at Murray Hill. Between 1988 and 2002 he was with the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lehigh University. His research interests include linear and nonlinear optical beam interactions, synthetic optical materials, optical solitons, and quantum electronics. He has authored and co-authored more than 250 papers. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society. In 2011 he received the R.W. Wood Prize of OSA.

Sir John Brian Pendry

Imperial College London, UK

Sir John B. Pendry is an English theoretical physicist educated at Downing College, Cambridge, UK, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in 1969. He is a professor of theoretical solid - state physics at Imperial College London where he was Head of the Department of Physics (1998 – 2001) and Principal of the Faculty of Physical Sciences (2001 – 2002). John Pendry has made seminal contributions to surface science, disordered systems and photonics.

David R. Smith

Duke University, USA

David R. Smith is currently the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University and Director of the Center for Metamaterial and Integrated Plasmonics. He also holds the positions of Adjunct Associate Professor in the Physics Department at the University of California, San Diego, and Visiting Professor of Physics at Imperial College, London. Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in 1994 in Physics from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Dr. Smith's research interests include the theory, simulation and characterization of unique electromagnetic structures, including photonic crystals and metamaterials.

Smith and his colleagues at UCSD demonstrated the first left-handed (or negative index) metamaterial at microwave frequencies in 2000--a material that had been predicted theoretically more than thirty years prior by Russian physicist Victor Veselago. No naturally occurring material or compound with a negative index-of-refraction had ever been reported until this experiment. In 2001, Smith and colleagues followed up with a second experiment confirming one of Veselago's key conjectures: the 'reversal' of Snell's law. These two papers--the first published in Physical Review Letters and the second in Science--generated enormous interest throughout the community in the possibility of metamaterials to extend and augment the properties of conventional materials. Both papers have now been cited nearly 4,000 times each.

Exploring nanoscale chirality: issues of parity, scale and measurement

David Andrews, University of East Anglia, UK

High Performance Visible Wavelength Dielectric Metasurfaces for Planar Photonic Components

Federico Capasso, Harvard University, USA

Microcavity polaritons: fundamental physics and devices

Benoit Deveaud, EPFL, Switzerland

Tunable Light-matter Interaction With Quantum Spillover and Super-radiance in Two Dimensional Molecular Aggregates

Nicholas X. Fang, MIT, USA

Wave Control with space-time transformations

Mathias Fink, Institut Langevin, France

Nanoplasmonics in 2D and atomic-scale materials

Javier García de Abajo, ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain

Quantum Phenomena in Hybrid Nanostructures: Exciton-Plasmon Interactions and the Quantum Structure of the Plasmon Excitations

Alexander Govorov, Ohio University, USA

Nanoplasmonic biosensors for real applications: trends and challenges

Laura M. Lechuga, Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (CSIC), Spain

Selected problems of light scattering by dielectric nanostructures

Boris Luk'yanchuk, Data Storage Institute (A*STAR), Singapore

Real-time Tunable Nanoparticle Lasing Spasers

Teri W. Odom, Northwestern University, USA

Metamaterial Elements as Huygens Radiators

Omar Ramahi, University of Waterloo, Canada

Casimir-like forces between particles under fluctuating optical fields

Juan Jose Saenz, Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), Spain

Nanophotonics with Plasmonic Ceramics

Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue University, USA

Anisotropy makes the difference: systropic,  bulbic, and porcupic metamaterials

Ari Sihvola, Aalto University, Finland

Topologically Non-Trivial States in Photonic Crystals

Marin Soljačić, MIT, USA