Nacer Chahat

Nacer Chahat is a Senior Antenna/Microwave Engineer and Systems Engineer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. He received a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Ecole Supérieur d’ingénieurs de Rennes (ESIR), Rennes, France, in 2009; a Master’s degree in telecommunication and a Ph.D. degree in signal processing and telecommunications from the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes (IETR), University of Rennes 1, France, in 2009 and 2012, respectively.

Since he joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he worked on several flight projects: Mars Helicopter, Mars 2020, SWOT, Europa Clipper, NiSAR, MarCO, NeaScout, Lunar Flashlight, RainCube, LunaH-map, Lunar IceCube, BioSentinel, CUSP, and INCUS. He is the author of the book “Cubesat antenna design” published by Wiley – IEEE Press in January 2021. He authored and co-authored over 100 technical journal articles and conference papers and has written 4 book chapters. In 2021, he became the youngest Fellow of IEEE.

Yuri Kivshar

Yuri Kivshar received PhD degree in 1984 in Kharkov (Ukraine). From 1989 to 1993 he worked at several research centers in USA and Europe, and in 1993 he moved to Australia where he established Nonlinear Physics Center at the Australian National University. His research interests include nonlinear physics, metamaterials, and nanophotonics. He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, OSA, APS, SPIE, and IOP. He received many awards for his research including Lyle Medal (Australia), Lebedev Medal (Russia), The State Prize in Science and Technology (Ukraine), Harrie Massey Medal (UK), Humboldt Research Award (Germany), 2020 SPIE Mozi Award (USA), and more recently 2022 Max Born Award (Optica, former OSA).

Stefano Maci

University of Siena, Italy
2023 President of IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society

Stefano Maci received the Laurea Degree cum Laude at University of Florence in 87 and from ‘97 is a Professor at the University of Siena. His research interest includes high-frequency and beam representation methods, computational electromagnetics, large phased arrays, planar antennas, reflector antennas and feeds, metamaterials and metasurfaces. Since 2000 he was member the Technical Advisory Board of 12 international conferences, member of the Review Board of 6 International Journals. He organized 25 special sessions in international conferences, and he held 10 short courses in the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) Symposia about metamaterials, antennas and computational electromagnetics. In 2004-2007 he was WP leader of the Antenna Center of Excellence (ACE, FP6-EU) and in 2007-2010 he was International Coordinator of a 24-institution consortium of a Marie Curie Action (FP6). He has been Principal Investigator from 2010 of 6 cooperative projects financed by European Space Agency. In 2004 he was the founder of the European School of Antennas (ESoA), a post graduate school that presently comprises 34 courses on Antennas, Propagation, Electromagnetic Theory, and Computational Electromagnetics and 150 teachers coming from 15 countries. Since 2004 is the Director of ESoA.

Professor Maci is IEEE Fellow since 2004, he has been a former member of the AdCom of IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), associate editor of AP-Transaction, Chair of the Award Committee of IEEE AP-S, and member of the Board of Directors of the European Association on Antennas and Propagation (EurAAP). From 2008 to 2015 he has been Director of the PhD program in Information Engineering and Mathematics of University of Siena, and from 2013 to 2015 he was member of the National Italian Committee for Qualification to Professor. He has been former member of the Antennas and Propagation Executive Board of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET, UK). He is presently the director of the consortium FORESEEN, presently involving 48 European Institutions, and principal investigator of the Future Emerging Technology project “Nanoarchitectronics” of the 8th EU Framework program. He was co-founder of 2 Spin-off Company. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), and recipient of the EurAAP Award in 2014, of the IEEE Shelkunoff Transaction Prize 2015, and of the Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator award 2016. In 2020 will be TPC Chair of the METAMATERIAL conference. In the last ten years he has been invited 25 times as key-note speaker in international conferences. The research activity of Professor Maci is documented in 150 papers published in international journals, (among which 100 on IEEE journals), 10 book chapters, and about 400 papers in proceedings of international. These papers have received around 6800 citations with h index 41.

Dorota Anna Pawlak

Dorota Anna Pawlak (DAP) obtained her PhD (1999) and habilitation (2013) degrees at the University of Warsaw, Chemistry Dept. DAP was a Head of the Department of Functional Materials at Ł-ITME/Ł-IMiF, Leader of the Laboratory of Materials Technologies at the Chemistry Dept. at UW, first coordinator of a collaborative NMP FP7 EU-funded Project in Poland, laureate of two TEAM Projects (FNP), holding grants from such foreign institutions as the Air Force Office for Scientific Research in U.S. Currently she leads Teaming for Excellence H2020 and IRAP projects and is the president of the board of the ENSEMBLE3 Centre of Excellence. DAP works on the interface between crystal growth, nanophotonics and new materials concepts. She proposed utilizing the crystal growth techniques for metamaterials and plasmonic materials applications – which is a novel idea within the world research community.

Marin Soljačić

Marin Soljačić is a Professor of Physics at MIT. He is a founder of a few companies, including WiTricity Corporation (2007) and Lightelligence (2017). His main research interests are in artificial intelligence as well as electromagnetic phenomena, focusing on nanophotonics, non-linear optics, and wireless power transfer. He is a co-author of more than 300 scientific articles, more than 100 issued US patents, and he has been invited to give more than 100 invited talks at conferences and universities around the world. He is a recipient of the Adolph Lomb medal from the Optical Society of America (2005), and the TR35 award of the Technology Review magazine (2006). In 2008, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship “genius” grant. He is an international member of the Croatian Academy of Engineering since 2009. In 2011 he became a Young Global Leader (YGL) of the World Economic Forum. In 2014, he was awarded Blavatnik National Award, as well as Invented Here! (Boston Patent Law Association). In 2017, he was awarded "The Order of the Croatian Daystar, with the image of Ruđer Bošković", the Croatian President’s top medal for Science. In 2017, the Croatian President also awarded him with "The Order of the Croatian Interlace" medal. He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science for six consecutive years: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, he was awarded Max Born award of Optica.

Paolo Focardi

Paolo Focardi is currently a Group Lead for Technology Development at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Florence, Italy, in 2002. During his PhD, he worked for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and with NASA and DLR at the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). In 2001 he worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the development of an accurate and comprehensive electromagnetic model of THz detectors between 600 GHz and 2.5 THz. In 2002, after defending his PhD, he joined the staff of JPL again as a Post-Doc and then became Staff Engineer in 2004. Between 2004 and 2009 he worked on remote sensing of human vital signs which led to the creation of two start-up companies and to the filing of several US patents. In 2008 he briefly supported the JUNO Mission, currently flying around Jupiter, and then joined the team developing the instrument antenna for SMAP, including the first spinning deployable mesh reflector antenna ever flown by JPL. He was the first to model the entire SMAP observatory and to get very accurate predictions of the radiation patterns which were never measured on the ground. He was also responsible for the design and delivery of the COWVR instrument antenna, a flight project in collaboration between JPL and the US Air Force to measure wind speed over the ocean, which is currently flying on the ISS. Starting in 2013 he led the development of the feed assembly for NISAR, a project in collaboration between NASA and ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, which is currently in its final phases of integration and testing before launch, expected in early 2025. He’s currently working on INCUS, an Earth science mission aimed at measuring how water vapor and droplets move inside tropical storms with three satellites flying in close formation in low Earth orbit equipped with Ka-Band radars and deployable mesh reflectors. His work is focused on analytical and numerical methods in electromagnetism for the analysis and design of RF circuits and antennas. He has authored and co-authored over 70 journal and conference publications including two book chapters about reflector antennas. He is also the chair of the Coastal Los Angeles Section of IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society.

Gabriele Gradoni

Gabriele Gradoni received the Ph.D. degree in electromagnetics from Universita Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy, in 2010. He was a Visiting Researcher with the Time, Quantum, and Electromagnetics Team, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, U.K., in 2008. From 2010 to 2013, he was a Research Associate with the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. From 2013 to 2016, he was a Research Fellow with the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham, U.K., where he became a Full Professor of applied mathematics and electromagnetics engineering in 2022.

In May 2023, Gabriele joined the Institute for Communication Systems, University of Surrey, as a Full Professor and Chair in Wireless Communications. Currently, he is also an Adjunct Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA, and a Visiting Fellow with the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, UK. His research interests include electromagnetic modelling of complex systems, meta-surface modelling, stochastics electrodynamics, wave chaos, and quantum computational electromagnetics, with applications to electro-magnetic compatibility and modern wireless communication systems.

He received several international awards including URSI Commission B. Young Scientist Award in 2010 and 2016, the Gaetano Latmiral Prize in 2015, and the Honorable Mention IEEE TEMC Richard B. Schulz Transactions Prize Paper Award in 2020. From 2014 to 2021, he was the URSI Commission E. Early Career Representative. Since 2020, he has been a Royal Society Industry Fellow at British Telecom, UK.

Xiao Hu

Xiao Hu received his Ph.D. degree in physics from The University of Tokyo, Japan in 1990. He then worked in Tohoku University as a research associate and then an associate professor, before moving to NIMS in 1996. Since 2024, he has settled down in Shanghai University, China, as a distinguished professor, meanwhile he holds a visiting professorship in Institute of Science Tokyo. His major is theory for condensed matter physics. He proposed theoretically a scheme to realize topological photonic crystal based on deformed honeycomb lattice by means of semiconductor nanofabrication. He was a PI of JST CREST program on material topology from 2018 through 2024, and had been leading to team including experimentalists. His team succeeded in revealing various properties of topological interfacial electromagnetic transport as well as building a high-performance topological surface emitting laser (TCSEL).

Lingling Huang

Lingling Huang is a professor in Beijing Institute of Technology, China. She received her Double B.S. degree (both Science and Engineering B.S. degree) in Optoelectronics from Tianjin University and Nankai University, Tianjin, China, in 2009. And she received Ph. D. degree in Optical Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2014. Her research activities are focused on optical metasurfaces, nanophotonics and holographic-related technique. She has published more than 120 SCI papers. She has received Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Youth Science Prize from Ministry of Education, China, et al.

Renato Lombardi

Renato Lombardi is the Director of the Huawei Italy Research Center and Vice President of Huawei’s Microwave Product Line. In these roles, he oversees the research and development of microwave and millimeter-wave technologies for wireless communications, as well as the implementation of innovative mobile broadband backhaul solutions worldwide. He joined Huawei in 2008, founding the Huawei Research Center in Milan, Italy. In 2011, he was honored with the title of "Huawei Fellow for Microwave."

Renato Lombardi has more than 30 years of experience in the microwave and millimeter-wave industry. He previously led Siemens’ Microwave Business and Product Management and, in 2006, was appointed Director of Research and Development. In 2015, he was elected Chair of the ETSI Industry Study Group mWT (millimeter-Wave Transmission). He also serves as an industry representative on the Board of the European Microwave Association.

Renato Lombardi holds a Master’s Degree in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, the largest and most prestigious technical university in Italy.

Konstantinos Makris

Konstantinos Makris is Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, of the University of Crete and Affiliated Researcher at the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) of Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH). He obtained his PhD in Theoretical Photonics from the School of Optics and Photonics (CREOL-FCPE) at the University of Central Florida, Orlando (USA) in 2008. From 2008 until 2010 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. During 2011 he was Lecturer at Institute for Theoretical Physics of Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien), Austria. From 2012 until 2015 he was a Marie Curie fellow between Princeton University, USA and TU-Wien, Austria. His current research interests lie on non-Hermitian physics, nonlinear optics, photonics lattices and wave propagation in complex media. He has more than 100 publications in refereed journals and more than 60 invited talks-colloquia at international conferences/schools and Institutions. In 2022 he was awarded an ERC consolidator grant related to open disorder systems. He was also elected as a 2023 Fellow of OPTICA (former OSA).

Masaya Notomi

Masaya Notomi received his B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics from The University of Tokyo, Japan in 1986, 1988, and 1997, respectively. He joined NTT Optoelectronics Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in 1988 and moved to NTT Basic Research Laboratories in 1999. Since then, his research interest has been to control the optical properties of materials and devices by using artificial nanostructures, and engaged in research on quantum wires/dots and photonic crystal structures. In 1996-1997, he was a visiting researcher of Linkoping University, Sweden. He was a guest associate professor of Applied Electronics in 2003-2009 and is currently a guest professor of Physics in Tokyo Institute of Technology. He was appointed as Senior Distinguished Scientist of NTT since 2010. He is currently a director of NTT Nanophotonics Center. He received IEEE/LEOS Distinguished Lecturer Award in 2006, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) prize in 2009, Japan Academy Medal in 2009, the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Prize for Science and Technology, Research Category) in 2010, and IEEE Fellow grade in 2013. He served as a member of National University Corporation Evaluation Committee in the Japanese government. He is a research director of JST CREST program from 2015. He is also a member of the Japan Society of Applied Physics, APS, IEEE, and OSA.

Willie Padilla

Duke University, USA

Willie Padilla is the Dr. Paul Wang Distinguished Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Director of the Metamaterials Center with a master's degree and doctorate in physics. He received a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Padilla is a fellow of the IEEE, American Physical Society, Optical Society of America and Kavli Frontiers of Science. He is also a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in physics for 2018 and 2019. He heads a group working in the area of metamaterials with a focus on machine learning, computational imaging, spectroscopy and energy, and has published more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Hrvoje Petek

Hrvoje Petek received B.S. (MIT; 1980), and PhD degrees in Chemistry from the (University of California, Berkeley 1985). He was a postdoctoral researcher and research associate at the Institute for Molecular Science in Japan from 1985 to 1993. From 1993 to 2000, he was a group leader at the Hitachi Advanced Research Laboratory, where he established his research on ultrafast photoemission spectroscopy. In 2000 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh, where he is the R. K. Mellon Chair in Physics and Astronomy, and Professor of Chemistry. There he broadened his research to include ultrafast photoemission electron microscopy of coherent plasmonic fields. He has received awards relating to his national and international activities including the Alexander von Humboldt Award (Germany; 2000), Morino Award (Japan; 2014) Ahmed Zewail Award in Ultrafast Science and Technology (USA; 2019), and President’s International Fellowship Initiative (China; 2022). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Editor-in-Chief of Progress in Surface Science.

Gennady Shvets

Gennady Shvets received his Ph.D. in Physics from MIT in 1995. Previously he has held research positions at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and was on the faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology. His research interests include nanophotonics, optical and microwave metamaterials and their applications (including bio-sensing, optoelectronic devices, and vacuum electronics), and plasma physics. He is the author or coauthor of more than 180 papers in refereed journals, including Science, Nature Physics, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, and Nano Letters. Dr. Shvets was a Department of Energy Postdoctoral Fellow in 1995-96. According to the ISI Web of Science, his work was cited over 7,000 times, giving him an h-factor of 45. He was a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2000. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and Optical Society of America (OSA).

Ventsislav K. Valev

Ventsislav K. Valev is a Professor in the Physics Department of the University of Bath (UK). He received his PhD from the Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). Subsequently, he was a post-doc and a Research Fellow at the KU Leuven University (Belgium), and in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (UK). He joined the University of Bath as a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2019, he was promoted to professor, in 2021 he became the Director of Research for the Department of Physics, and in 2022 he was appointed Head of Department. Valev’s research team focuses on the interaction between powerful laser light and nanostructured materials. He builds laser experiments to study novel materials, such as plasmonic nanostructures, metamaterials, 2D materials and quantum optical materials. He explores the physics of photons, electrons and magnetism confined to tiny volumes of space – nanoparticles or 2D sheets. He aims to discover new properties and to test theoretical predictions, seeking out new and useful intersections between classical electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. His investigations are both fundamental and applied. Valev’s work is very interdisciplinary; it has been distinguished with the Thomas Young Medal of the Institute of Physics, the Horizon Prize from the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a Fellow of Optica, SPIE, and the Institute of Physics.

Rachel Won

Rachel Won is an International Editor of Nature Photonics. She joined the journal in June 2006 as one of four Founding Editors. Before that, Rachel worked for Aston University's Business Partnership Unit in Birmingham, UK, as a Medici Fellow commercializing research output of the university, particularly that of photonics research. She obtained her PhD in microwave photonics and nonlinear optics as a member of Aston's Photonics Research Group. She worked for Philips Optical Storage in Singapore as an Optics Engineer after completing her Master's degree study in Nanyang Technological University of Singapore doing research in optical fibre sensing. She holds a Bachelor's degree from the National University of Malaysia. She is a Fellow of OPTICA and the International Society of Optics and Photonics (SPIE).

Anatoly V. Zayats

Anatoly V. Zayats is a Chair in Experimental Physics and the head of the Photonics & Nanotechnology at the Department of Physics, King’s College London, where he also leads Nano-optics and Near-field Spectroscopy Laboratory (www.nano-optics.org.uk). He is a Co-Director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the London Institute of Advanced Light Technologies. His current research interests are in the areas of nanophotonics, plasmonics, metamaterials, optical spin-orbit coupling, plasmonically-derived hot carriers, scanning probe microscopy, nonlinear and ultrafast optics and spectroscopy, and optical properties of surfaces, thin films, semiconductors and low-dimensional structures. He is a founding co-editor-in-chief of Advanced Photonics journal. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Optical Society of America, SPIE, the Royal Society of Chemistry and elected Member of Academia Europaea.