Jacopo Bertolotti

Jacopo Bertolotti got his PhD in Physics from the University of Florence (IT) in 2008 with a thesis entitles "Light transport beyond diffusion". He then moved to the University of Twente (NL) to work on wavefront shaping and then to the Institut Langevin (FR) to work on speckle correlations. In 2013 he got a permanent position at the University of Exeter (UK), where he is now Associate Professor, leading a group that focuses on imaging through scattering media and optical computing.

Website: https://jacopobertolotti.com/

Topic of the lectures: Optical wave scattering

Monika Fleischer

Monika Fleischer is a Professor at the Institute for Applied Physics and the BioNanoPhysics Centre of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, where she also earned her PhD degree in physics. She serves as a member of the board of directors at the Centre for Light–Matter Interaction, Sensors and Analytics. Her research interests focus on nanofabrication, optical spectroscopy, numerical simulation of optical antennas and hybrid nanoantenna configurations, e.g. for plasmonic sensing or tailored emission purposes.

Website: Plasmonic Nanostructures Group

Topic of the lectures: Steering and analyzing interactions between single nanoantennas and emitters

Marian Florescu

Marian Florescu is a Professor at the Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton. He received a BSc in Physics from the University of Bucharest and a PhD in Theoretical Quantum Optics from the University of Toronto. Before joining Southampton in December 2024, he was a professor at the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey, a Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University, and a National Research Council Research Associate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research focuses on ordered and disordered nanophotonic materials, thermophotovoltaic energy conversion, and quantum optics in structured photonic reservoirs.

Website: https://personalpages.surrey.ac.uk/m.florescu/

Topic of the lectures: Hyperuniformity and Local Self-Uniformity in Photonic Systems: Fundamentals and Applications

Francesco Monticone

Francesco Monticone is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on applied electromagnetics, metamaterials and metasurfaces, and nanophotonics, with a focus on theoretical foundations and novel wave phenomena. Prof. Monticone has authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications and delivered more than 80 invited talks and seminars. His research and teaching have been recognized with several awards and honors, including Cornell Engineering's Research Excellence and Teaching Excellence Awards, the ONR and AFOSR Young Investigator Program Awards (YIPs), and the Leopold B. Felsen Award for Excellence in Electrodynamics. Prof. Monticone served as TPC Chair for Metamaterials'2025 and currently serves as an Associate Editor of Optica and Chief Scientific Officer of Heat Inverse Inc, a technology startup based in Ithaca, NY.

Website: https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/people/francesco-monticone/

Topic of the lectures: Fundamentals of light interaction with complex media and metamaterials

Marco Abbarchi

Marco Abbarchi is a researcher in solid-state physics turned entrepreneur in 2020, when he co-founded SOLNIL. He has made several experiences in the field of semiconductor nano-structures (III-V and IV-IV), with specific competence in spectroscopic characterization as well as in growth and nano-fabrication. Within SOLNIL, he is now active in the field of etch-less nano-imprint lithography of metal oxides, such as SiO₂ and TiO₂ for the nano-fabrication and production-scaling of nano-photonic devices, such as photonic meta-surfaces.

Website: https://solnil.com/

Title of the seminar: Artificial Structural Colours: Materials, Methods and Challenges for Industrialization

Marta De Luca

Marta De Luca is an Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). She is expert in advanced optical spectroscopy of low-dimensional materials, with special focus on the electronic, optical and phononic properties of nanomaterials (nanowires, 2D materials etc). In 2023 M. De Luca founded a new group (Nanospectroscopy) and built a new lab in Sapienza University. In 2022 she was awarded an ERC starting grant from the European Community and in 2021 she was awarded with a Rita Levi Montalcini grant from the Italian Ministry of Education and the Laura Bassi prize from the Italian Society of Physics. From 2015 to 2021 M. De Luca worked in the Nanophononics group in the Physics Department of the University of Basel (Switzerland). In 2019 she became researcher in the University of Basel thanks to the Ambizione grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation, focused on engineering the functional properties of quantum dots and quantum rings in nanowires.

Website: https://www.nanospectroscopylab.com/

Title of the seminar: On-demand engineering optical emission properties in nanowires

Giovanni Pellegrini

Giovanni Pellegrini is an Associate Professor at the Physics Department of the Università di Pavia, Italy. He previously held post-doctoral fellowships at Politecnico di Milano and Università di Padova. His main research interests lie in computational plasmonics, nanophotonics, and nano-optics. His current principal research activities include the adoption of neural networks for signal processing, photonics design, image reconstruction and phase retrieval. He also focuses on broadband superchiral sensing at the nanoscale and the inverse design of photonics and plasmonic nanostructures, tackling this problem with diverse tools including genetic optimization, gradient based optimization, and physics informed neural networks.

Website: Giovanni Pellegrini

Title of the tutorial: Neural networks and their frameworks: a toolbox for photonics inverse design problems.

Rachel Won

Rachel Won is Chief Editor of Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering.

Title of the seminar: TBA