Nader Engheta

University of Pennsylvania, USA

Nader Engheta is the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, with affiliations in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and Bioengineering. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Tehran, and his M.S and Ph.D. degrees from Caltech. His current research activities span a broad range of areas including nanophotonics, metamaterials, nano-scale optics, graphene optics, optical metatronics, imaging and sensing inspired by eyes of animal species, optical nanoengineering, microwave and optical devices, and physics and engineering of fields and waves He has received several awards for his research including the 2017 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award from the IEEE Photonics Society, the 2015 Gold Medal from SPIE, the 2015 Fellow of US National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the 2015 National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow (NSSEFF) Award (also known as Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow Award) from US Department of Defense, the 2015 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award, the 2015 Wheatstone Lecture in King’s College London, the 2014 Balthasar van der Pol Gold Medal from the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the 2013 Inaugural SINA Award in Engineering, the 2012 IEEE Electromagnetics Award, 2006 Scientific American Magazine 50 Leaders in Science and Technology, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He is a Fellow of seven international scientific and technical societies, i.e., IEEE, URSI, OSA, APS, MRS, SPIE, and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has received the honorary doctoral degrees from the Aalto University in Finland in 2016 and from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 2016.

Sir John Brian Pendry

Imperial College London, UK

Sir John B. Pendry is an English theoretical physicist educated at Downing College, Cambridge, UK, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in 1969. He is a professor of theoretical solid - state physics at Imperial College London where he was Head of the Department of Physics (1998 – 2001) and Principal of the Faculty of Physical Sciences (2001 – 2002). John Pendry has made seminal contributions to surface science, disordered systems and photonics. His most famous work has introduced a new class of materials, metamaterials, whose electromagnetic properties depend on their internal structure rather than their chemical constitution. He discovered that a perfect lens manufactured from negatively refracting material would circumvent Abbeʼs diffraction limit to spatial resolution, which has stood for more than a century. His most recent innovation of transformation optics gives the metamaterial specifications required torearrange electromagnetic field configurations at will, by representing the field distortions as a warping of the space in which they exist. In its simplest form the theory shows how we can direct field lines around a given obstacle and thus provide a cloak of invisibility. John Pendryʼs outstanding contributions have been awarded by many prizes, among which the Dirac Prize(1996), the Knight Bachelor (2004), the Royal Medal (2006), the Isaac Newton Medal (2013) and the Kavli Prize (2014).

Eli Yablonovitch

UC Berkeley, USA

Eli Yablonovitch introduced the idea that strained semiconductor lasers could have superior performance due to reduced valence band (hole) effective mass. With almost every human interaction with the internet, optical telecommunication occurs by strained semiconductor lasers. He is regarded as a Father of the Photonic BandGap concept, and he coined the term "Photonic Crystal". The geometrical structure of the first experimentally realized Photonic bandgap, is sometimes called “Yablonovite”. In his photovoltaic research, Yablonovitch introduced the 4(n squared) (“Yablonovitch Limit”) light-trapping factor that is in worldwide use, for almost all commercial solar panels. His mantra that "a great solar cell also needs to be a great LED”, is the basis of the world record solar cells: single-junction 28.8% efficiency; dual-junction 31.5%; quadruple-junction 38.8% efficiency; all at 1 sun. His startup company Ethertronics Inc., has shipped over one billion cellphone antennas.

Prof. Yablonovitch is elected as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. He has been awarded the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society, the Isaac Newton Medal of the UK Institute of Physics, the Rank Prize (UK), the Harvey Prize (Israel), the IEEE Photonics Award, the IET Mountbatten Medal (UK), the Julius Springer Prize (Germany), the R.W. Wood Prize, the W. Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, and the Adolf Lomb Medal. He also has an honorary Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, & the Hong Kong Univ. of Science & Technology, and is honorary Professor at Nanjing University.

Eli Yablonovitch is the Director of the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), a multi-University Center headquartered at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1972. He worked for two years at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and then became a professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. In 1979 he joined Exxon to do research on photovoltaic solar energy. Then in 1984, he joined Bell Communications Research, where he was a Distinguished Member of Staff, and also Director of Solid-State Physics Research. In 1992 he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was the Northrop-Grumman Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering. Then in 2007 he became Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, where he holds the James & Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering.