Plenary speakers

George Eleftheriades
University of Toronto

"Advances in Huygens' Metasurfaces and Their Applications"

George V. Eleftheriades earned his Ph.D. and M.S.E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1993 and 1989 respectively. Currently he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto where he holds the Canada Research/Velma M. Rogers Graham Chair in Engineering. Prof. Eleftheriades introduced some of the early concepts in using transmission lines to realize negative-index metamaterials. Together with his graduate students he has produced the first experimental demonstration of focusing beyond the diffraction limit with a Veselago-Pendry lens and invented a number of novel and practical antenna/microwave/optical devices.
Prof. Eleftheriades is the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Field Award and the 2015 IEEE John Kraus Antenna Award. He is an IEEE Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has been the general chair of the 2010 IEEE Intl. Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and CNC/USNC/URSI Radio Science Meeting which was held in Toronto, Canada July 11-17, 2010. Together with his graduate students he co-authored several award-winning papers, including the 2010 IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Best Paper Award, twice (2008 & 2012) the RWP King Best Paper Award from the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, as well as the 2014 Piergiorgio Uslenghi Best Paper Award from the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. 

Mathias Fink
Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI)

"Wave Control with Space-Time Transformations"

Mathias Fink received a Ph.D. degree in Solid State Physics in 1970 from Paris University. Mathias Fink is a Professor of Physics on the Chair George Charpak at the Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI Paris), France. In 1990 he founded the Laboratory Ondes et Acoustique at ESPCI that became in 2009 the Langevin Institute. In 2002, he was elected at the National Academy of Technology of France, in 2003 at the French Academy of Science and in 2008 at the College de France on the Chair of Technological Innovation. He has received several scientific awards as the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Award of the Acoustical Society of America (2005), the CNRS medal of innovation (2011), The Yves Rocard Prize of French Society of Physics (2011), the Rayleigh Award of the IEEE UFFC Society (2012), the ERC SYNERGY Grant (European Research Council) for the HELMHOLTZ project (2013) and the Edwin H. Land Medal of the Optical Society of America (2014).
Mathias Fink’s area of research is concerned with the propagation of waves in complex media and the development of numerous instruments based on this basic research. His current research interests include time-reversal in physics, wave control in complex media, super-resolution, metamaterials, telecommunications, ultrasonic and optical imaging, multiwave imaging. He holds more than 70 patents and has published more than 400 peer reviewed papers and book chapters. 6 start-up companies with close to 300 employees have been created from his research (Echosens, Sensitive Object, Supersonic Imagine, Time Reversal Communications, Cardiawave and Greenerwave).
 

Steven Johnson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

"Simulations Aren't Just Experiments: Analytical Transformations in Photonics Computation"

Steven G. Johnson is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at MIT. He works in the field of nanophotonics—electromagnetism in media structured on the wavelength scale, especially in the infrared and optical regimes—on many aspects of the theory, design, and computational modeling of nanophotonic devices, both classical and quantum. He is coauthor of over 200 papers and over 25 patents, including the second edition of the textbook Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light, and was ranked among the top ten most-cited authors in the field of photonic crystals by ScienceWatch.com in 2008. In addition to traditional publications, he distributes several widely used free-software packages for scientific computation, including the MPB and Meep electromagnetic simulation tools (cited in over 1000 papers to date) and the FFTW fast Fourier transform library (for which he received the 1999 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software). 

Vladimir M. Shalaev
Purdue University

"Plasmonic Metamaterials 2.0: from Nanophotonics to Energy Applications"

Vladimir M. Shalaev, Scientific Director for Nanophotonics at Birck Nanotechnology Center and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, specializes in nanophotonics, plasmonics, and optical metamaterials. Vladimir M. Shalaev has received several awards for his research in the field of nanophotonics and metamaterials, including the Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America for his pioneering contributions to the field of optical metamaterials, the Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics, Rolf Landauer medal of the ETOPIM (Electrical, Transport and Optical Properties of Inhomogeneous Media) International Association, the UNESCO Medal for the development of nanosciences and nanotechnologies OSA and SPIE Goodman Book Writing Award, and IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, APS, SPIE, MRS and OSA. Prof. Shalaev has authored three books, twenty-eight invited book chapters and over 400 research publications.