About Andrea Alù

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Andrea Alù is the founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), Einstein Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the CUNY Graduate Center and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York. 

He received the Laurea, MS and PhD degrees from the University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy, respectively in 2001, 2003 and 2007. After spending one year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 2009 he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Alù was a Full Professor and the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor #3 at the University of Texas at Austin with was affiliated with the Wireless Networking and Communications Group, an interdisciplinary center for research and education with an emphasis on industrial relevance; as well as the Applied Research Laboratories where he was involved in research projects on electromagnetics and acoustics.

His current research interests span over a broad range of areas, including metamaterials and plasmonics, electromangetics, optics and photonics, scattering, cloaking and transparency, nanocircuits and nanostructures modeling, miniaturized antennas and nanoantennas, RF antennas and circuits, acoustic devices and metamaterials. He is the co-author of an edited book on optical antennas, over 30 book chapters, nearly 700 conference papers, and over 400 journal papers, among which several high-impact publications with a large number of citations to date.  His findings on metamaterials, plasmonics and cloaking are regularly highlighted in the general press, with recent appearances on BBC, CNN. NBC, and several others.

In light of his scientific record, Dr. Alù has received several scientific awards and recognitions from various technical societies, including the NSF Alan T. Waterman award (2015), the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering from TAMEST (2016), the ICO Prize in Optics (2016), the OSA Adolph Lomb Medal (2013), the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011), the 2014 Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, the inaugural Franco Strazzabosco Award  and the Medal of Representation of the President of the Republic of Italy (2013), the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics (2013), the SPIE Early Career Investigator Award (2012), an NSF CAREER award (2010), the AFOSR and the DTRA Young Investigator Awards (2010, 2011). His students have also received several awards and recognitions, including student paper awards at IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposia (in 2011 to Y. Zhao, in 2012 to J. Soric), the first paper award in Metamaterials 2013 (to F. Monticone) and an IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Doctoral Research Award (to F. Monticone).

Dr. Alù is a Fellow of IEEE, OSA, SPIE and APS, and a full member of URSI. He has been nominated a Simons Foundation Investigator in Physics in 2016, and a finalist for the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists in 2016, 2017 and 2018. He serves on the Editorial Board of Physical Review B, Advanced Optical Materials and New Journal of Physics, and as an Associate Editor of five journals, including the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters and Optics Express. He has also guest edited special issues for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, for the Journal of the Optical Society of America B, for Optics Communications, for Metamaterials and for Sensors on a variety of topics involving metamaterials, plasmonics, optics and electromagnetic theory. He has been elected an APS Outstanding Referee by the editors of Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, serves as IEEE AP-S Distinguished Lecturer since 2014, as OSA Traveling Lecturer since 2010, and as the IEEE joint AP-S and MTT-S chapter chair for Central Texas.

Since 2014, Dr. Alù has been also serving as Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Audio RF Circulator, a company that holds the exclusive license of two inventions from Alù’s lab at UT Austin: magnetic-free circulators for sound and radio waves.