Faculty Investigator, IRG 2

Andrea Alù is a Distinguished Professor, the founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York.  Until 2018 he was the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor #3 at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is currently a Senior Research Scientist and an Adjunct Professor. He is affiliated with the Wireless Networking and Communications Group, an interdisciplinary center for research and education at The University of Texas at Austin with an emphasis on industrial relevance. He is also affiliated with the Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is involved in research projects on electromagnetics and acoustics.
He received the Laurea, MS and PhD degrees from the University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy, respectively in 2001, 2003 and 2007. After spending one year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 2009 he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. His current research interests span over a broad range of areas, including metamaterials and plasmonics, electromangetics, optics and photonics, scattering, cloaking and transparency, nanocircuits and nanostructures modeling, miniaturized antennas and nanoantennas, RF antennas and circuits., acoustic and mechanical devices and metamaterials. He is the co-author of an edited book on optical antennas, over 35 book chapters, over 900 conference papers, and over 650 journal papers, among which several high-impact publications with a large number of citations to date. His findings on metamaterials, plasmonics and cloaking are regularly highlighted in the general press, with recent appearences on BBC, CNN. NBC, and several others.
In light of his scientific record, Dr. Alù has received several scientific awards and recognitions from various technical societies. He was named the 2021 Blavatnik National Award Laureate in Physics and Engineering, and has received the Dan Maydan Prize in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (2021), the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2020), the DoD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2019), the IUMRS Young Researcher Award (2018), the ICO Prize in Optics (2016), the inaugural MDPI Materials Young Investigator Award (2016), the Kavli Foundation Early Career Lectureship in Materials Science (2016), the inaugural ACS Photonics Young Investigator Award Lectureship (2016), the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering (2016), the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award (2015), the IEEE MTT Outstanding Young Engineer Award (2014), the OSA Adolph Lomb Medal (2013), the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics (2013), the Franco Strazzabosco Award for Young Engineers (2013), the SPIE Early Career Investigator Award (2012), the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011), an NSF CAREER award (2010), the AFOSR and the DTRA Young Investigator Awards (2010, 2011), Young Scientist Awards from URSI General Assembly (2005) and URSI Commission B (2010, 2007 and 2004).
Dr. Alù is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, AAAS, IEEE, MRS, OSA, SPIE and APS, and a full member of URSI. He is currently the President of the Metamorphose Virtual Institute for Artificial Electromagnetic Materials and Metamaterials, the Director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Wave Phenomena Based on Symmetry, and a member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. He is a Simons Foundation Investigator in Physics since 2016, a Highly Cited Researcher from Web of Science since 2017, and a finalist of the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists for six times before becoming the Blavatnik Laureate in Physics and Engineering in 2021. He serves as Associate Editor of Applied Physics Letters and is on the Editorial Board of Physical Review B, Advanced Optical Materials and New Journal of Physics, and as an Associate Editor of five journals, including the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters and Optics Express. He has also guest edited several special issues for the Proceedings of IEEE, the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, the Journal of the Optical Society of America B, Optics Communications, Metamaterials and for Sensors on a variety of topics involving metamaterials, plasmonics, optics and electromagnetic theory. He has been named an APS Outstanding Referee by the editors of Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, serves as IEEE AP-S Distinguished Lecturer since 2014, as OSA Traveling Lecturer since 2010, and as the IEEE joint AP-S and MTT-S chapter chair for Central Texas. 
Since 2014, Dr. Alù has been also serving as Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Audio RF Circulator, a company that holds the exclusive license of a few inventions stemming from Alù’s lab around magnetic-free technology for non-reciprocal devices.