Andrea Alù, Ph.D.

Andrea Alù is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), the Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, the founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York. He received his Laurea (2001), M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) from the University of Roma Tre, and was the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor at the University of Texas at Austin until 2018. In 2015, he was the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Visiting Professor at the AMOLF Institute in the Netherlands. His research interests span over applied electromagnetics, nano-optics, polaritonics, and acoustics. Alù is credited with a number of discoveries, including the first experimental demonstration of a three-dimensional electromagnetic cloak of nonreciprocal phenomena in magnet-free metamaterials, of electromagnetic time-reflections, and of extreme nonlinearities in quantum-engineered metasurfaces.

Dr. Alù is a Simons Investigator in Physics, and the director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Wave Phenomena Driven by Symmetries. He serves as the president of the Metamorphose Virtual Institute for Artificial Electromagnetic Materials and Metamaterials, as the chair of the IEEE Joint New York Chapter and as editor-in-chief of Optical Materials Express. He is a full member of URSI, a life fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Materials Research Society (MRS), Optica, the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), and the American Physical Society (APS). Since 2017, he has been a Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher, and he has received several awards and recognitions for his research activities, including the Max Born Award (2024), the SPIE Mozi Award (2024), the IEEE AP-S Distinguished Achievement Award (2023), the Brillouin Medal (2021), the Blavatnik National Award in Physical Sciences and Engineering (2021), the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2020), the DoD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2019), the ICO Prize in Optics (2016), the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering (2016), the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award (2015), the Franco Strazzabosco Award for Young Engineers (2013), and the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011).