Prominent Plenary Speakers at the World of Photonics Congress

Prof. Dr. Jörg Wrachtrup, who is the head of the 3rd Institute of Physics at the University of Stuttgart, received the first ever Zeiss Research Award this year. He received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award for his research work in 2011 and the Max Planck Research Award in 2014.

Prof. Sir David Neil Payne is a leading Professor at the University of Southampton and Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre. A world class pioneer of technology, his work has had a great impact on telecommunications and laser technology over the last forty years.

Professor Ferenc Krausz is the Director at Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and Chair of Experimental Physics at LMU. Krausz and his team of researchers generated and measured the first light pulse with a duration of less than a femtosecond. This achievement marked the beginning of attosecond physics.

Prof. Ed Boyden is a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology group, which develops tools for analyzing and repairing complex biological systems such as the brain.

Dr. Aydogan Ozcan is currently the Chancellor’s Professor at UCLA. He holds 33 issued patents and more than 20 pending patent applications for his inventions in telemedicine, mobile health, nanoscopy, wide-field imaging, lensless imaging, nonlinear optics, fiber optics, and optical coherence tomography.

Prof. Paulo Jorge da Silva Bártolo has a PhD on Mechanical Engineering from the University of Reading (UK). Currently he is Professor on Advanced Manufacturing Processes and Director of the Centre for Rapid and Sustainable Product Development at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Professor of the Cátedra UNESCO of Biomaterials at the University of Habana (Cuba), Founder of the Portuguese-British Biomanufacturing Network and member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Biofabrication.

Dr. Paul Hilton moved over 20 years ago to work at The Welding Institute TWI Ltd. in the field of laser technology. He became Technology Fellow for Laser Materials Processing in 2010. During his time at TWI, Paul Hilton has served twice as President of the UK Association of Laser Users and is currently Chairman of the Executive Board of ELI, the European Laser Institute.

Professor Federico Capasso is the Robert Wallace Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University. He is known for his pioneering work in nanoscale science and technology ranging from the co-invention of quantum cascade lasers to flat optics based on metasurfaces, which is revolutionizing the design of lenses.
His research has encompassed a broad range of topics including band-structure engineering of semiconductor nanostructures, quantum devices, the discovery of repulsive Casimir forces and plasmonics.

Prof. Demetri Psaltis is the Dean of the School of Engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is also a Professor in Bioengineering and Director of the Optics Laboratory of the EPFL.
He is one of the founders of the term and the field of optofluidics. In optofluidics, he is focusing on developing technologies for energy harvesting purposes by leveraging the advantages of microfluidic systems.

As the Fayez Sarofim Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Randall Hulet is a pioneer researcher in experimental atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics. At the Hulet Lab, Rice University, he leads a team of research students in the study of collision of solitons and the detection of anti-ferromagnetic correlations.

Hulet is the winner of the 2017 Herbert Walther Award sponsored by the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) and The Optical Society (OSA). He will be honored for his groundbreaking research and discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensation in an atomic gas with attractive interactions.