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.

Jason Valentine

Vanderbilt University, USA

"Meta-optics for Edge Computing Applications"

Jason Valentine received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Purdue University in 2004 and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley in 2010. In 2010 he joined the faculty in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Vanderbilt University where he is currently a Professor. 

Prof. Valentine's past and current work includes the development of bulk plasmonic optical metamaterials, transformation inspired devices such as optical cloaks, dielectric metamaterials at optical frequencies, and hot electron devices. His work was selected by Time Magazine as one of the "Top 10 Scientific Discoveries in 2008". At Vanderbilt he has received an NSF CAREER Award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award for research on dielectric metamaterials.

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

"Chiral Polariton Lasing from Plasmonic Metasurfaces"

Teri W. Odom is the Joan Husting Madden and William H. Madden, Jr. Professor of Chemistry and an expert in the design of structured nanoscale materials that exhibit extraordinary size and shape-dependent optical and physical properties.

Odom is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Materials Research Society, American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, Optica, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is Senior Member of SPIE. Select awards include the SPIE Mozi Award, RSC Centenary Prize, the ACS National Award in Surface Science, a Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was the founding chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Noble Metal Nanoparticles and is Editor-in-Chief of Nano Letters.

Silvia Vignolini

University of Cambridge, UK

"Bio-Inspired Self-Assembled Chiral Architecture for Optics and Plasmonics"

Silvia Vignolini is the Director of the Sustainable and Bio-inspired Materials Department at the Max Plank for Colloid and Interfaces in Potsdam and a University Professor in Sustainability and Bio-inspired materials at the Chemistry Department in Cambridge. She studied Physics at the University of Florence, Italy. In 2009, she was awarded a PhD in Solid State Physics at the European Laboratory for non-Linear Spectroscopy and the Physics Department at the University of Florence. In 2010, she moved to Cambridge as a post-doctoral research associate working in the Cavendish Laboratory and the Plant Science Department. Her research interest lies at the interface of chemistry, soft-matter physics, optics, and biology. In particular, her research focuses on the study of how biopolymers are assembled into complex architectures within living organisms and how they can be exploited to fabricate a sustainable functional materials.