Plenary speakers

Alexandra Boltasseva
Purdue University, West Lafayette (USA)

"Advancing Metasurface Design and Quantum Photonics with Machine Learning"

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.

Mark L. Brongersma
Stanford University, Stanford (USA) 

"Flat Optics for Dynamic Wavefront Manipulation and AR/VR"

Mark Brongersma is a Professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He leads a research team of ten students and three postdocs. Their research is directed towards the development and physical analysis of new materials and structures that find use in nanoscale electronic and optical devices. He coined the terms Plasmonics (with Harry Atwater) and Mietronics for the fields of science and technology that manipulate light at the nanoscale with metallic and high-index semiconductor nanostructures. He is on the list of Global Highly Cited Researchers (Clarivate Analytics). He received a National Science Foundation Career Award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, the International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (Physics) for his work on plasmonics, and is a Fellow of the OSA, the SPIE, and the APS. Dr. Brongersma received his PhD from the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam with Albert Polman, The Netherlands, in 1998. From 1998-2001 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology with Harry Atwater and Kerry Vahala.

Tie Jun Cui
Southeast University, Nanjing (China)

"Information Metamaterials and Systems"

Tie Jun Cui is the Chief Professor of Southeast University, Nanjing, China. He is also the Founding Director of the Institute of Electromagnetic Space, Southeast University. His research interests include metamaterials and computational electromagnetics. He proposed the concepts of digital coding and programmable metamaterials and realized their first prototypes, based on which he further proposed information metamaterials to bridge the physical world and digital world and new architecture information systems. He received the National NaturalScience Awards of China in 2014 and 2018. He is the Academician of Chinese Academy of Science, and IEEE Fellow.

Sebastian Huber
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Zurich (Switzerland)

"Dissipation Engineering for New Topological Phenomena"

Sebastian Huber studied physics at ETH Zürich where he received his diploma in 2004. After his doctoral studies at ETH Zürich under the supervision of Prof. Gianni Blatter he moved to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. During his time in Israel he was generously supported by fellowships from the Swiss friends of the Weizmann Institute, the Koshland prize and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). In 2012 he returned to the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH Zürich as an SNSF Professor. In 2015 Sebastian Huber started a line of experimental research on metamaterials design. Since 2018, he runs his research group under the framework of an ERC Consolidator Grant. Sebastian Huber's research interest are centered around the theoretical and experimental investigation of classical topological wave phenomena as well as the application of information theory and machine learning to the foundations of quantum statistical many-​body systems.