Centre Member Profile

Dr Yana Izdebskaya received a PhD degree in the field of Optics and Laser Physics from Taurida National University, Ukraine in 2007. In 2008, she moved to Australia, taking up a Postdoctoral Fellow position at the Nonlinear Physics Centre at the Australian National University (ANU) and joined the research project in Singular Photonics. In 2009, the emphasis of Dr. Izdebskaya’s research at ANU shifted towards the nonlinear effects in liquid crystals and in 2010, Dr. Izdebskaya initiated the first experimental project in Australia working on the self-trapped beams in liquid crystals.

Dr Izdebskaya is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including SPIE Educational Scholarships in Optical Science and Engineering (2005, 2006, 2007); the Young Scientists Grants at Taurida National University (2006 and 2007); an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship (ARC, 2011) and Discovery Project (ARC, 2013). Between 2014-2019, Yana held different research positions at ANU and she was an expert reviewer for European Commission of the Research and Innovation programmes: “Horizon 2020 FET-Open”, “Novel Ideas for Radically New Technologies” and “Challenging Current Thinking”, Belgium, Brussels (2017- 2020).

In 2019, Yana also worked as a Skills Assessor at Engineers Australia in the National Office. Since 2020, Dr Izdebskaya has joined TMOS at ANU to take up a Research Fellow position. Her current work is focused on the development of dynamically tunable dielectric metasurfaces by liquid crystals, with the purpose to design reconfigurable devices for efficient light modulation applications.