Plenary Sessions in 2023

Dr. Tammy Ma is a plasma physicist at NIF. She leads a number of the fusion experiments at the NIF and currently heads the X-Ray Analysis Group for the ICF programme.

Ma earned her bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Caltech in 2005, then received her master's degree in 2008, and Ph.D. in 2010, both from the University of California, San Diego. Ma completed a postdoc at LLNL before becoming a staff scientist in 2012. Experimental Plasma Physicist in Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and High Energy Density Physics, National Ignition Facility (NIF), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in Livermore, California. Ma was recently awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on early-career science and engineering professionals. She also received the American Physical Society 2016 Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research.

Prof. Constantin Häfner became director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen in November 2019. Previously, he was Program Director for Advanced Photon Technologies at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where he has led the development of the world’s most powerful laser systems.

After graduating from the University of Konstanz with a degree in physics, he obtained a Ph.D. in laser physics from the University of Heidelberg. In 2004, Häfner moved to the United States, first to the Nevada Terawatt Facility, University of Nevada, Reno, and subsequently, in 2006, to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou.

Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations.Strickland earned a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester and a B.Eng. from McMaster University.

Claudio Conti (Ph.D. 2002, ERC StGrant 2008) is currently the Director of the Institute of Complex Systems of the Italian National Research Council (ISC-CNR) in Rome (Italy). Formerly, he was New Talent Grant from the Research Center Enrico Fermi; Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light; Senior Researcher at CNR; Principal Investigator of the Starting Independent Research Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), with the project Light and Complexity; Principal Investigator of the ERC Proof of Concept Grant Vanguard; Principal Investigator of the Templeton Foundation Grant Generalized Uncertainty Principle and the Photon; and Associate Professor at the Department of Physics of the University Sapienza.

In 2012, Valeria Tirelli succeeded her father as CEO of Aidro. Aidro was founded by Paolo Tirelli, an Italian engineer with a vast experience in the hydraulics sector, in 1982.

Starting from 2017, Aidro introduced the new technology Additive Manufacturing, enabling the production of Metal 3D Printed products in the hydraulics sector.

Driven by the desire to innovate and by the continuous growth of 3D printing, the company has expanded its activity to other sectors such as aerospace, energy and oil & gas.

In 2021 Aidro joins Desktop Metal family to growth in fluid power with Additve Manufacturing.

Topic:

“Additive manufacturing for sustainable solutions in hydraulics”

Dr. Farsari is a Research Director at the Institute of the Electronic Structure and Laser, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, where she joined in 2003. Her main research interests are light-based additive manufacturing, multi-photon lithography, laser-based nanofabrication, and materials processing using ultrafast lasers.

She received her first degree in 1992 from the Physics, University of Crete and her PhD in 1997 from the Physics Department, University of Durham, UK. After graduating, Farsari worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Universities of Durham and Sussex and as a Senior Optical Scientist for the security company DeLaRue Holographics.

Topic:

“Additive manufacturing for sustainable solutions in hydraulics”

Melissa Skala is an Investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research and a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her lab develops biomedical optical imaging technologies for cancer research, cell therapy, and immunology.

Topic:

“Fluorescence lifetime imaging of NAD(P)H and FAD to monitor immune cell metabolism and function“

YongKeun (Paul) Park is an Endowed Chair Professor of Physics at KAIST. Dr. Park’s area of research is optics, holography, and bioimaging. He has published +160 peer-reviewed papers with +14K citations, including 4 Nat Photon, 1 Nat Mat, 1 Nat Cell Biol, 4 Nat Comm, 4 PRL, 6 PNAS papers. He is a Fellow of Optical Society of America (OSA) and Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Two start-up companies with +80 employees have been created from his research (Tomocube, The.Wave.Talk). To learn more about Prof. Park's research projects, visit his website: http://bmol.kaist.ac.kr.

Topic:

"Holotomography and artificial intelligence: label-free 3D imaging, classification, and inference of live cells and organoids"

Zeev Zalevsky received his B.Sc. and direct Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Tel-Aviv University in 1993 and 1996 respectively. Zeev is currently a full Professor and the Dean of the faculty of engineering in Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His major fields of research are optical super resolution, biomedical optics, nano-photonics and fiber-based processing and sensing architectures. Zeev has published more than 570 peer review papers, 340 proceeding papers, 9 books (6 authored and 3 as an editor), 32 book chapters and about 100 patents. Zeev gave about 620 conference presentations with more than 220 invited/keynote or plenary talks.

Zeev is a fellow of many large scientific societies such as SPIE, OSA, IEEE, EOS, IOP, IET, IS&T, ASLMS, AIMBE and more. He is also a fellow of the American National Academy of Inventors (NAI). For his work he received many national and international prizes such as the Krill prize, ICO prize and Abbe medal, SAOT prize, Juludan prize, Taubelnblatt prize, young investigator prize in nanotechnology, the International Wearable Technologies (WT) Innovation World Cup 2012 Prize, Image Engineering Innovation Award, NANOSMAT prize, SPIE startup challenge prize, SPIE prism award, IAAM Scientist Medal Award, International Photonic Award, Dr. Horace Furumoto Innovations Professional award, The Asian Advanced Materials Award, Edison Award, IEEE distinguished lecturer award, VEBLEO Scientist Award, Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize, Lotfi Zadeh Memorial Award, E&T Innovation Award, CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2022 Innovation Awards, German Innovation Awards 2022, the Humboldt research prize, SPIE 2023 Chandra S. Vikram Award for Metrology and more.

Besides his academic research activity, Zeev is also very active in commercializing his inventions into start-up companies. Zeev was and is involved in technologically leading of more than 10 startup companies.

Sanjay Gangadhara is the Senior Program Director for Optics at Ansys. In this role, he drives the long-term strategy for the technologies at Ansys that support the design and manufacture of innovative optical products. Sanjay has a B.S. in Chemical and Nuclear Engineering from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT. While he has been working at Ansys since 2021, Sanjay joined Ansys through their acquisition of Zemax, a company for which he previously worked 14 years.

Rainer Blatt’s research focuses on trapped ions as a means to address fundamental questions in quantum optics, spectroscopy, and quantum information science. In the laboratory, individual ions are confined in electromagnetic traps under ultrahigh vacuum, and their electronic states are manipulated and probed using laser beams. Experiments in his group, including the demonstration of quantum gates and highly entangled ion strings, have established that ions are outstanding candidates for quantum bits in a quantum computer. Current research themes include the investigation of light-matter quantum interfaces, the scalability of ion traps for quantum information processing, and the use of trapped ions to simulate quantum processes.