Richard W. Ziolkowski

Richard W. Ziolkowski (ScB 1974, Brown University, MS'75 and PhD'80 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in Physics) is the Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Professor in the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona. He is also a Professor in the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. He was the Computational Electronics and Electromagnetics Thrust Area Leader in the Engineering Research Division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before joining the University of Arizona in 1990. Professor Ziolkowski is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Optical Society of America. He was President of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society in 2005. He also has been actively involved with the URSI, OSA, and SPIE technical societies. He has served on the International Advisory Boards and Technical Program Committees of several international conferences, including iWAT, ISAP, Metamaterials, and META.  He and Prof. Nader Engheta, University of Pennsylvania, are Co-Editors of the best selling 2006 IEEE-Wiley book, Metamaterials: Physics and Engineering Explorations.

Harry Atwater

Harry Atwater is currently Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests center around two interwoven research themes: photovoltaics and solar energy; and plasmonics and optical metamaterials. Atwater and his group have been active in photovoltaics research for more than 20 years. Recently they have created new photovoltaic devices, including the silicon wire array solar cell, and layer-transferred fabrication approaches to III-V semiconductor III-V and multijunction cells, as well as making advances in plasmonic light absorber structures for III-V compound and silicon thin films. He is an early pioneer in surface plasmon photonics; he gave the name to the field of plasmonics in 2001. He has authored or co-authored over 200 publications, and his group’s developments in the solar and plasmonics field have been featured in Scientific American and in research papers in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics and Advanced Materials.

Atwater received his S.B. (1981), S.M. (1983), and Ph.D. (1987) in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He currently serves as as Director of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center on Light-Matter Interactions in Solar Energy Conversion and was recently named Director of the Resnick Institute for Science, Energy and Sustainability, Caltech’s largest endowed research program focused on energy. Atwater is founder and chief technical advisor for Alta Devices, a venture-backed company in Santa Clara, CA developing a transformational high efficiency/low cost photovoltaics technology, and Aonex Corporation, a compound semiconductor materials company. He has also served an editorial board member for Surface Review and Letters. Professor Atwater has consulted extensively for industry and government, and has actively served the materials community in various capacities, including Material Research Society Meeting Chair (1997), Materials Research Society President (2000), AVS Electronic Materials and Processing Division Chair (1999), and Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences. In 2008, he served as Chair for the Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics.

Atwater has been honored by awards including the MRS Kavli Lecturer in Nanoscience in 2010; Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award, 2010; Joop Los Fellowship from the Dutch Society for Fundamental Research on Matter in 2005, A.T. & T. Foundation Award, 1990; NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, 1989; IBM Faculty Development Award, 1989-1990; Member, Bohmische Physical Society, 1990; IBM Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1987.

Costas M. Soukoulis

Costas Soukoulis received his B.S. in Physics from Univ. of Athens in 1974. He obtained his doctoral degree in Physics from the Univ. of Chicago in 1978. From 1978 to 1981 he was visiting Assistant Professor at the Physics Dept. at Univ. of Virginia. He spent 3 years (1981-84) at Exxon Research and Engineering Co. and since 1984 has been at Iowa State Univ. (ISU) and Ames Laboratory. He has been an associated member of FORTH since 1983 and since 2001 is a Professor (part time) at Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering at Univ. of Crete. He has approximately 330 publications, more than 130 invited lectures at national and international conferences, and about 110 invited talks at institutions. More than 16000 citations, an h-factor of 69 and 3 patents for PBGs and LHMs. Graduated 17 PhD students and co-advised 4 others. Has obtained several grants to support his research from DOE, NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOR, NATO, EPRI, and European Community. Has been a member or a chairman of various International Scientific Committees responsible for various International Conferences. Prof. Soukoulis is Fellow of the American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the ISU Outstanding Achievement in Research in 2001, and the senior Humboldt Research Award in 2002; he shared the Descartes award for collaborative research on left-handed materials in 2005; and the first Frances M. Craig endowed chair in Physics at ISU in 2007. He is the senior Editor of the new Journal "Photonic Nanostructures: Fundamentals and Applications", and editor of Optics Letters. Finally, a textbook entitled Wave Propagation: From Electrons to Photonic crystals and Left-handed Materials, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008.