Andrea Alù Named Blavatnik National Awards Laureate for Nano-Optics, Materials Advancements

Andrea Alù, founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at The City University of New York (CUNY ASRC), and Einstein Professor of Physics at CUNY's Graduate Center, was named the 2021 Blavatnik National Awards Laureate in Physical Sciences and Engineering.

The Blavatnik National Awards, presented annually by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, honor early-career scientists and engineers who have made trailblazing discoveries in their fields. Alù, along with two other laureates, was selected from 298 nominations by 157 institutions across the U.S. Each laureate will receive $250,000, the world's largest unrestricted prize for early-career scientists and engineers.

Professor Andrea Alù. Courtesy of CUNY.

The award recognizes Alù's research discoveries in materials science, physics, and engineering, which have led to advancements in electromagnetics, nano-optics, and acoustics. His efforts are leading to new and enhanced technologies with potential applications in cellular communications, energy harvesting, radar cloaking, noninvasive therapeutics, and more. Alù's work has received major support from numerous funders, including a $3 million Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the most prestigious single-investigator award from the U.S. Department of Defense; a $3.2 million grant from DARPA; and a Simons Collaboration in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences grant of up to $16 million. He has been recognized as a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards every year since 2016.

In the June issue of Physical Review X, Alù and his group discuss how it is possible to create metasurfaces by controlling thermal radiation and photoluminescence rather than coherent external light (www.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.021050).