Romain Fleury is Associate Professor and head of the Laboratory of Wave Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he leads interdisciplinary research at the intersection of wave physics, scattering, and engineered materials. His work focuses on the fundamental physics of wave emission, propagation and scattering, non-reciprocal and topological wave phenomena, and the use of acoustic, optical and microwave metamaterials to achieve unprecedented control of waves in complex environments.

He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015, working with Andrea Alù, and subsequently served as a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at ESPCI Paris with Mathias Fink, before joining EPFL in 2017. His recent research explores how wave momentum and information can be shaped and harnessed for advanced functionalities — from multi-objective acoustic manipulation to physical neural networks and analog computing — bridging concepts from metamaterials, inverse scattering, and machine learning.

Prof. Fleury has received multiple recognitions including an ERC Starting Grant, the 2021 Brillouin Medal from the International Phononics Society, and the 2019 Polysphere Award for teaching excellence. He is also active in metamaterials technology transfer as founder of the start-up Minwave (2021). This talk will distill these themes, highlighting application opportunities at the nexus of wave physics, metamaterials, and information.

Michal Lipson

Columbia University, USA

"TBD"

Prof. Lipson pioneered critical building blocks in the field of Silicon Photonics, which today is recognized as one of the most promising directions for solving the major bottlenecks in microelectronics. She is the inventor of over 45 issued patents and has co-authored more than 300 scientific publications, and is the co-founder of the silicon photonics for AI startup Xscape Photonics. In recognition of her work in silicon photonics, she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her numerous awards include the NAS Comstock Prize in Physics, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Blavatnik Award, Optica’s R. W. Wood Prize, the John Tyndall Award, the IEEE Photonics Award, and an honorary degree from Trinity College, University of Dublin. She was elected the President of Optica in 2023, formerly known as The Optical Society. Since 2014, every year she has been named by Thomson Reuters as a top 1% highly cited researcher in the field of Physics. 

Peter McMahon

Cornell University, USA

"Programmable Waveguide Metamaterials for Linear and Nonlinear Optics"

Peter McMahon is an Associate Professor of Applied & Engineering Physics at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2014, where he also performed his postdoctoral training in Applied Physics until starting as a faculty member at Cornell in 2019. He has received Packard and Sloan Fellowships and is the recipient of the Lomb Medal from Optica.

Teri W. Odom

Northwestern University, USA

"TBD"

Silvia Vignolini

University of Cambridge, UK

"TBD"