Centre Member Profile

Andrea Alù is the Founding Director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center. He is also the Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York, and Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. 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 UPenn, in 2009 he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor until 2018.

His current research interests span over a broad range of areas, including metamaterials and plasmonics, electromagnetics, optics and nanophotonics, acoustics, scattering, nanocircuits and nanostructures, miniaturized antennas and nanoantennas, RF antennas and circuits.

He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, AAAS, IEEE, OSA, APS and SPIE, a Highly Cited Researcher since 2017, a five-times Blavatnik awardee and a Simons Investigator in Physics, a Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE AP-S and OSA. He has received several awards for his scientific work, including the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2020), the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award (2015), the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from DoD (2019), the ICO Prize in Optics (2016), the OSA Adolph Lomb Medal (2013), and the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011).