Andrea Alù: The 2024 SPIE Mozi Award
Andrea Alù — founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the City University of New York (CUNY) Advanced Science Research Center, Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a professor of electrical engineering at the City College of New York — is an influential leader in photonics and nano-optics, with an emphasis on optical metamaterials, leveraging new wave phenomena and their applications for practical technologies. The broad range of his research interests encompass applied electromagnetics: microwave, THz, infrared, optical, and acoustic metamaterials and metasurfaces; plamonics; nonlinearities and nonreciprocity; cloaking and scattering; optical nanocircuits; and nanoantennas. He is also affiliated with the Wireless Networking and Communications Group and the Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a senior research scientist and adjunct professor. Alù is widely regarded by the optics, physics, and engineering communities as a star in research and education, given his outstanding and transformative contributions to theory, modeling, and experimental demonstrations of seminal concepts in the optics and photonics field. His professional recognitions include the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, a Blavatnik National Award, the International Commission for Optics Prize, the URSI (International Union of Radio Science) Issac Koga Gold Medal, and, in 2012, the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award.
An SPIE Fellow since 2017, Alù has delivered multiple seminars to SPIE Student Chapters in both the United States and France; he has also delivered more than 40 invited talks at SPIE conferences, and has published more than 90 journal and conference papers in SPIE publications. Along with his fellow authors, he was the recipient of a 2022 Editor-In-Chief Choice Award for the article “Photonics of time-varying media,” which was published in the SPIE and Chinese Laser Press co-published journal Advanced Photonics. He served on the SPIE Fellows Committee from 2018 to 2020 and is currently a chair of the High Contrast Metastructures conference at SPIE Photonics West 2024. Over the years, Alù has served as a conference committee member for more than 30 conferences across SPIE Photonics West and SPIE Optics + Photonics.
“I have known Andrea Alù’s work since 2006 through his many scientific papers and his conference presentations,” says Imperial College London physics professor and Condensed Matter Theory Group Lead Sir John Pendry. “Metamaterials and plasmonics are related fields which are the subjects of intense activity at the moment due to their great potential to revolutionize much of electromagnetism. Andrea Alù is in the midst of this activity and is one of the leading young players in a talented field. He has shown great imagination in driving forward concepts such as ‘epsilon near zero’ metamaterials, novel antennae, cloaking devices in the plasmonic domain, and non-linear metamaterials. The latter is of particular interest because it offers the ability to tune the properties of a metamaterial in situ, thereby cutting out the need for expensive electronics to control many devices. More recently, his interests have turned to time-dependent systems, a dynamic new area of metamaterial research which adds a fourth dimension in which to make designs. Again, he is one of the leading figures in this new field which presents challenges and opportunities to theorists and experimentalists alike. With this award, SPIE recognizes a very talented young researcher at the height of his powers.”
