PHOTONICA 2021

Alexandra Boltasseva is a Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes 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, nanofabrication, optical materials, and quantum photonics. 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 National Academy of Inventors (NAI), Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of Optical Society of America (OSA) and Fellow of SPIE. She served on MRS Board of Directors and is currently Editor-in-Chief for OSA's Optical Materials Express journal.

Short bio is available here.

Short bio is available here and here.

Dr. Nori received a PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois, and then did postdoctoral research work at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, now KITP, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Afterwards, he became Assistant, Associate, full Professor and Research Scientist at the Physics Department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a RIKEN Chief Scientist, leading the “Theoretical Quantum Physics Laboratory” at RIKEN (the Japanese National Laboratory). His research group has done pioneering interdisciplinary studies at the interface between nanoscience, dissipative quantum open systems, quantum information processing, superconducting quantum circuitry for quantum computing, photonics, quantum optics, atomic physics, nano-mechanics, mesoscopics, computational physics, and condensed matter physics. During the past decade, his research group has produced more than 40 highly-cited papers (i.e., top 1% most cited publications among all papers in all areas of Physics) according to the Web of Science. He has more than 116 publications in Physical Review Letters, over 60 in Science and Nature journals, and also numerous in other top journals. According to the Web of Science: > 44K citations and h-index ~100 (Google Scholar: > 64K citations and h-index ~117). He has been a "Highly Cited Researcher” during 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 (ranked in the top 1% in Physics by the Web of Science). 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 Latin American Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Swedish Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Meint K. Smit started research in photonic integration in 1981. He invented the Arrayed Waveguide Grating, a key component in modern WDM systems, for which he received a LEOS Technical Achievement award in 1997. He was closely involved in the introduction of MMI-couplers, which are key components in Photonic ICs. In 2000 he became the leader of the Photonic Integration group at the COBRA Research Institute of TU Eindhoven. His current research interests are in InP-based Photonic Integration and integration of InP circuitry on Silicon. He is the founder of the JePPIX platform, the Joint European Platform for Photonic Integration of Components and Circuits and strongly involved in the development of the InP-based photonic foundry system in Europe. Meint Smit is an IEEE Fellow. In 2012 he received an ERC Advanced Grant and in 2016 the Rank Prize for Optoelectronics.

Professor Andrew Clayton was educated at the University of Melbourne, Australia culminating in a PhD in physical chemistry (spectroscopy). He decided to switch fields to biophysics and began this transition, supported by an Australian Research Council Post-doctoral Fellowship, in the Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne under the mentorship of Professor William Sawyer. There he (together with Prof Sawyer) developed site-specific tryptophan fluorescence footprinting and oriented circular dichroism to examine the structure, orientation and dynamics of alpha-helices interacting with lipid bilayers. He then began a second post-doc, this time at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany (Dr. Tom Jovin), where he contributed to the development of the first microscope for imaging rotational correlation times and homo-transfer of electronic energy in living cells. As a Human Frontiers Long-Term Fellow, he extended his post-doc experiences at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Melbourne Australia, where he focussed his research on a biomedically-important cell surface receptor and set-up the cell biophysics laboratory. Supported by an Assistant Membership from the Ludwig Institute and by an RD Wright Biomedical Career Fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council, his laboratory developed and applied new methods for visualising frequency-domain fluorescence lifetime imaging data resulting in improved discrimination of molecular interaction states in cells. Armed with these new techniques his laboratory provided evidence for a new quaternary structure for the epidermal growth factor receptor, challenging a 30 year-old model of how the receptor is activated. His laboratory moved from Ludwig institute to Swinburne University of Technology where he continues his research in the biophysics of living cells and enjoys teaching physics. A major thread in all of his research activities is the amazing power of fluorescence to reveal structural and dynamic information.

Carsten Ronning is chair professor at the Institute of Solid State Physics at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. He studied physics at the Universities of Bremen and Konstanz, and completed his PhD thesis on the growth of diamond-like materials in 1996. After holding a post-doc position at the North-Carolina State University (USA), he performed intense research at the University of Göttingen on thin films, semiconductor physics as well as on semiconductor nanowires with a strong background in ion-solid-interactions. Today at the University Jena, where he started in 2008, his research concentrates also on the optical properties of nano-scaled solids (www.nano.uni-jena.de).

Short bio is available here.

Short bio is available here.

Romain Quidant received a PhD in Physics (2002) from the University of Dijon, in France. Right after defending his thesis, he joined ICFO as a postdoctoral researcher. This was the year of ICFO's creation and he got actively involved into the early developments of the Institute. In 2006, he was appointed junior Professor (tenure-track) and group leader of the Plasmon NanoOptics group at ICFO. In 2009, he became tenure Professor both at ICFO and ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research). After nearly 18 years at ICFO, in June 2020, he joined the Mechanical and Process Engineering department (D-MAVT) at ETH Zurich as Director of the Nanophotonic Systems Laboratory. Quidant is recipient of 5 ERC grants (StG2010, PoC2011, PoC2015, CoG2015 and SyG2020) and several international and national prizes (Fresnel2009, City of Barcelona 2010, International Commission for Optics 2012, National research Prize 2014, Banc Sabadell 2017). He also serves as the executive editor of ACS Photonics (American Chemical Society).

Short bio is available here.

Short bio is available here.

Short bio is available here.

Daniel Leykam is a Senior Research Fellow in the Angelakis Group at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore. He completed his PhD in Physics at The Australian National University in 2015, for which he was awarded the Australian Institute of Physics Bragg Medal. Daniel has worked as a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2015-2017) and a junior research team leader at the Institute for Basic Science in Korea (2017-2020). His research interests include topological band theory, nonlinear optics, and quantum photonics.

Daria Smirnova received her Ph.D. in Physics in 2016 from the Australian National University, where she currently holds a prestigious Discovery Early Career Research Fellow position supported by the Australian Research Council. Her research interests include topological photonics, nonlinear nanophotonics and multipolar electrodynamics.

Dr. Lidorikis is Professor of Computational Materials Science in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Ioannina Greece. He received his BSc in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece (1993) and his PhD in computational physics from Iowa State University in USA (1999). He held postdoctoral positions in Louisiana State University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as an industry position in the MIT spin-off Luminus Devices Inc. His research interests are in Computational Material Science focusing on nanophotonics and nanoplasmonics, organic- and graphene-based optoelectronics, integrated optics for ICT, multiscale modeling of materials, optical spectroscopy and modeling of nanostructured materials and thin films. He has extensive R&D experience in both academia and industry and co-coordinated several European and National projects (FET, NMP, NMBP, ICT, etc). He is author of over 100 peer-reviewed papers and received over > 6500 citations holding an h-index=34. He is the holder of 19 US patents and given more than 50 invited talks in international conferences.

Gediminas Juzeliūnas is a distinguished professor at the Department of Physics, Vilnius University, Lithuania. He completed a Ph.D. at the Vilnius University (1986), held a postdoctoral position at the University of East Anglia, UK (1992-1994), was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Ulm, Germany (1997-1998) a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oregon, USA (2000-2001), had many other visiting fellowships . The current research of Gediminas Juzeli?nas focuses on ultracold atomic gases and atom-light interactions. In particular, this includes pioneering studies of light-induced gauge fields for ultracold atoms. Gediminas Juzeli?nas received a National State Prize for Science of Lithuania in 2008, he is a true member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

Dr. George A. Stanciu (www.cmmip-upb.org), is Professor of Physics at University Politehnica of Bucharest. He is head of Center for Microscopy-Microanalysis and Information Processing founded by him in 2001. He got his Doctor degree (Ph. D.) in Technical Physics in 1981. He received the Professor title in 1994. Starting with 1973 he has been working in the Laser Scanning Microscopy field. In 1977 his team reported the first Digital Laser Scanning Microscope. He has been working for long time in the frame of laser scanning microscopy (instrumentation and applications) and in the scanning probe microscopy (instrumentation and applications). Lately he has focused on the development of new scanning near field optical microscopy techniques with applications in Life Sciences and Materials Science. He has published over 130 ISI papers and participated with invited lectures at more than 50 conferences. Prof. George Stanciu is Senior member of the IEEE from 1995.

Short bio is available here.

Short bio is available at here.

Short bio is available here.

Short bio is available here.

Short bio is available here.

Short bio is available here.

Pablo Loza-Alvarez received his PhD in Laser Physics from the University of St Andrews, Scotland in 2000. After 2 postdoctoral positions (St Andrews and Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), he was incorporated, in 2004, to ICFO as a Group Leader where he is the head of the "Super Resolution Light Microscopy and Nanoscopy" lab at ICFO. Dr. Loza-Alvarez has now a strong experience in microscopy and, by introducing novel photonics tools, has developed a number of novel imaging techniques. These have been used for a wide variety of applications ranging from the imaging of large model organisms to the visualization of subcellular components. He has directed 8 PhD students, co-authored over 200 publications in international journals and conferences (h=33, Google Scholar) and has written 7 patents.

Sonia Boscolo received the BSc and MSc degrees in Physics from Université de Bourgogne (Dijon, France) and the PhD degree in Engineering and Applied Science from Aston University (Birmingham, UK) in 1998 and 2002, respectively. Since 2002, she has been working with Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies at Aston University, where she is currently a Senior Research Fellow. She has broad theoretical and modelling expertise in nonlinear optics and photonics, specialised in the exploration of fundamental theories of modern nonlinear science and their application in the context of fibre-optics communications and laser systems as well as in the design and modelling of novel nonlinear photonic systems and devices. She has published around 70 papers in international peer-reviewed academic journals (6 invited and 1 editorial), 5 book chapters, and around 140 papers in refereed international conference proceedings (39 invited conferences). She has produced 3 patents and co-edited a book on 'Shaping Light in Nonlinear Optical Fibers' published by Wiley. She has been the Principal Investigator in 3 research projects sponsored by the EPSRC and Leverhulme Trust (UK) and 2 British Council-sponsored collaborative research projects with European institutions, and the UK Leader of 4 European projects (Erasmus+ Mobility, Erasmus Mundus Partnership NANOPHI, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree EMIMEO).

Short bio is available here.

Dr. Jovanovic-Talisman received her bachelor's degree in physical chemistry from the University of Belgrade, Serbia in 2000 and earned her doctorate in chemistry from Columbia University in 2005. She did postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller University, and she subsequently pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After two years as an assistant professor of Chemistry at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, she joined the department of Molecular Medicine at the Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope in 2013.

Short bio is available here.

Ana Hudomal obtained her PhD in 2020 from the Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade. During her PhD studies, one of her main research interests were topologically non-trivial models which can be realized using ultracold quantum gases in optical lattices with synthetic magnetic fields, with a focus on the interplay of driving and interactions in such systems. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Quantum Many-Body Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leeds. Her recent work involves the development of new theoretical and computational approaches to study dynamics of strongly interacting quantum systems, in particular non-ergodic dynamics which leads to the phenomenon of quantum many-body scars.

Andrej Korenic was born in '84 in Belgrade, where in 2008 he completed his basic studies (bachelor and master) at the Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade, and then defended his doctoral thesis in 2015 in the field of neurobiology, more specifically molecular biology and biochemistry. In parallel with the preparation of his thesis, he began to engage himself in data analysis and programming, and after his doctorate he began to deal with the analysis of time series with machine learning for the needs of the international project on which he is engaged.

Danilo Kisic is a researcher of the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, at the Department of Atomic Physics. His main research focuses are physico-chemical properties of materials surfaces, ion beam modification of surface properties, thin film deposition, and interaction of liquids with solid surfaces. He received his PhD in 2020, at the Faculty of Physical Chemistry - University of Belgrade. The main topic of his PhD thesis was modification of surface properties of high density polyethylene, using high fluence ion beam implantation of iron. He is a coauthor of nine scientific papers, published in international journals.

Short bio is available here.

Jelena Pajovic is a physics Ph.D. (2018) with a background in nanotechnology. Her research is focused on photoexcitation processes of biomolecule-functionalized metal nanoparticles and their localization within live cells. Besides investigating the valence levels of such nanoobjects, she is interested in energy transfers between biomolecules attached to metal nanosurfaces, and explores alternative ways of optical detection of metal-based nanoparticles in various biological environments. During her Ph.D., she was on a two-year research stay at DISCO beamline, Synchrotron Soleil (France), a laboratory specialized in deep-ultraviolet fluorescence microscopy. As a part of a multidisciplinary team, she worked on the topic of multidrug-resistant bacteria and investigated intracellular accumulation rates of numerous antibiotics on single bacterial cell levels.

Milica Budimir received BSc and MSc degrees in Engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia in 2013 and 2014, respectively. She started her PhD studies in 2015, at the School of Electrical Engineering, the module for Nuclear, Biomedical, and Ecological Engineering. In 2016, she was granted with Scholarship from the French Government for co-tutorial PhD studies between the University of Lille, France, and the University of Belgrade, Serbia. Therefore, she has spent 16 months in Lille, working at the Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics, and Nanotechnology (IEMN). She received PhD degrees from both Universities in October 2020. Since 2015 she works at the "Vinca" Institute of Nuclear Sciences, in the Laboratory for Radiation Chemistry and Physics, where she is currently a Research Associate. Her research interest is in the field of carbon nanomaterials and their biomedical and ecological application. During her doctoral studies, she has been working on the synthesis of carbon nanomaterials and their nanocomposites with different polymers, characterization of these materials, and their antibacterial applications. Milica Budimir was a co-author of 25 articles in peer-reviewed journals and one book chapter.

Rok Podlipec is a biophysicist with expertise in various advanced microscopies and spectroscopies for the characterization of relevant biological tissues. He gained his doctoral degree in 2015 with the thesis entitled The analysis of cell-biomaterial interaction by advanced experimental techniques as the basis for biocompatibility studies of polymers, done on the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor. After the thesis he was employed as a postdoc research scientist in Laboratory of Biophysics on Jozef Stefan Institute, working as a head of experimental research focused on microspectroscopy-based optimization of diagnostics of retinal pathologies, development of new concepts and demonstrators for laser-induced retinal theranostics, and development of new fluorescence-based optical prototypes. Currently, he is employed as a Head of the Young Investigator Team at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) working on correlative microscopies applied to biological and non-biological systems to address relevant problems in nanotoxicology and air pollution.

Dr. Sho Oasa, Assistant Professor has acquired his BSc in Biology (2011) and his MSc (2013) and PhD (2016) degrees in Life Science at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. He has conducted his graduate education under Prof. Masataka Kinjo (2011-2016) and continued his research training at the postdoctoral level under his guidance (2016-2017), studying the dimerization of glucocorticoid receptor (GR) and the relationship between GR dimerization and transcriptional regulation at the single-cell level using Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) and Fluorescence Cross-Correlation Spectroscopy (FCCS). In 2018, he continued his postdoctoral training in Vladana Vukojević's research group, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, where he works together with Dr. Rudolf Rigler and Dr. Lars Terenius, Karolinska Institutet and Dr. Aleksandar Krmpot and Dr. Stanko Nikolić, Institute of Physics Belgrade, University of Belgrade, Serbia, on further development and advanced applications of Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy. In particular, the team has developed a new functional Fluorescence Microscopy Imaging (fFMI) modality with single-molecule sensitivity and high temporal resolution that is based on massively parallel Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy integrated with Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy (mpFCS/FLIM). In 2021, Dr. Oasa has acquired the Assistant Professor position at Karolinska Institutet. In his on-going research, he is using fFMI to quantitatively characterize the cellular dynamics of biomolecules and their interactions in live cells, furthering our understanding of cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying common diseases.

Tijana Tomašević-Ilić is a Research Associate at the Institute of Physics Belgrade, University of Belgrade. She obtained her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Belgrade-Faculty of Physical Chemistry in 2019. Dr. Tomašević-Ilić's work in the Laboratory for graphene, other 2D materials and ordered nanostructures is focused on liquid phase exfoliation of layered, two-dimensional nanomaterials, deposition of nanomaterials into thin films and their surface modification by various covalent and noncovalent strategies, spectroscopic and microscopic characterization, and investigation of thin films application. While her work originally is focused on graphene, the palette of 2D materials under her research study includes transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) such as MoS2 and WS2, layered insulators such as h-BN, and a host of hybrid structures based on 2D materials.