Two EPS/QEOD Fresnel Prizes are awarded for outstanding contributions to quantum electronics and optics made by young scientists before the age of 35 (as of December 31st during the year of CLEO/Europe-EQEC). There is one prize for fundamental aspects and one prize for applied aspects. The prize winners are each to receive a medal and 2000 euros.
The 2021 Fresnel Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Dr. Margherita Maiuri, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, for outstanding achievements in ultrafast optical spectroscopy, unveiling primary light-induced processes in bio-molecules and nanostructures with sub-10-fs pulses.
Margherita Maiuri received her PhD in Physics in 2014 at Politecnico di Milano, specializing in the field of ultrafast optics and spectroscopy. Later she obtained a Marie Curie Global Fellowship and worked at Princeton University (USA) for three years. Currently she is Assistant Professor at the Physics Department of Politecnico di Milano where she supervises the Ultrafast Spectroscopy Laboratory division focused on the study of complex systems for light-energy conversion. Her main research interests include the understanding of femtosecond dynamics of light-induced mechanisms in biological/biomimetic systems and nanostructures.
She has published >40 peer-reviewed articles, including publications in Science, Nature Photonics, Nature Chemistry, Nature Materials journals. She received the L’Oréal UNESCO for Women in Science Fellowship (2018) and the ENI award – Debut in Research (2015).
The 2021 Fresnel Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Prof. Michael Zuerch, University of California Berkeley, USA for outstanding contributions to the field of ultrafast condensed-matter science and for the application of linear and nonlinear X-ray spectroscopies to the investigation of quantum phenomena.
Michael Zuerch graduated from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, in 2010. He completed his PhD in Physics at the same institution in 2014 working on high-resolution imaging using laser-driven extreme ultraviolet sources based on high harmonic generation. He then joined the research groups of Stephen Leone and Daniel Neumark at UC Berkeley as a Feodor Lynen Fellow studying condensed phase quantum phenomena using attosecond extreme ultraviolet sources. At present, he is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Chemistry. His research interests include studying ultrafast dynamics and phase transitions in correlated solids using laboratory attosecond sources and developing and applying nonlinear X-ray spectroscopy at free-electron lasers.
The 2021 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Dr. Maxim Karpov, Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM), Neuchâtel, Switzerland for his work on exploring the dynamics of dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators and demonstration of their performance in real-world applications.
Maxim Karpov received his Doctorate in Physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland in 2020. His research interests lie at the intersection of nonlinear physics, microresonator-based photonic systems, and their emerging applications. During his Doctorate Maxim Karpov worked on microresonator-based optical frequency combs (microcombs), and experimentally discovered several soliton phenomena in microresonators including Raman self-frequency shift, soliton switching, and the formation of perfect soliton crystals. Dr. Karpov also contributed to many first demonstrations of new applications of microcombs in coherent optical communications, ultrafast distance measurements (LiDAR), and optical computing of convolution neural networks. He is now a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at the Swiss Centre of Electronics and Microtechnology.
The 2021 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Dr. Felipe Ignacio Pedreros Bustos, LAM – Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France, for his key contributions to improving sodium laser guidestars via modeling and laboratory and on-sky experimental validation and for demonstrating and documenting remote mesospheric magnetometry.
Felipe Pedreros Bustos is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France, where he investigates and develops new methods for laser guide star wavefront sensing in astronomy adaptive optics. He received his PhD in December 2019 from the Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz and Helmholtz Institut Mainz (Germany), working on novel techniques for remote magnetometry with laser guide stars and exploring the extensions of nonlinear processes in sodium vapor cells to mesospheric sodium. Previously, Felipe had also worked in several astronomical facilities including the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, Antarctica.
The 2021 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Dr. Paulo André Dias Gonçalves, ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Barcelona, Spain for fundamental contributions to nanoscale electrodynamics and light–matter interactions with the incorporation of quantum mechanical effects in metal nanostructures and two-dimensional nanophotonics.
P. André D. Gonçalves is a postdoctoral researcher at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain. His research interests encompass several areas of nanophotonics and condensed-matter physics, with focus on the nanoscale regime interfacing quantum and classical physics. He received his Ph.D. degree in September 2019, awarded by the Technical University of Denmark, Denmark. During his PhD, in the groups of N. A. Mortensen and A.-P. Jauho, he developed theoretical methods for describing multifaceted aspects related to the optical response of complex nanostructures and investigated the impact of quantum effects in various light–matter interactions in the few-nanometer regime. He previously obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in Physics from the Universities of Minho and Porto, respectively.
The 2021 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Dr. Renwen Yu, Stanford University, CA, USA for fundamental studies of light-matter interactions in nanosystems based on graphene, along with the exploration of applications in photodetection, light modulation, and optical sensing.
Renwen Yu received his PhD in Photonics in 2019 at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain. He worked in the area of theoretical nanophotonics, with a focus on light-matter interactions in nanosystems based on graphene. He previously obtained his bachelor’s degree in Optoelectronics and Information Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and his master’s degree in Photonics from Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. He is currently a postdoctoral associate at Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University. Here, his research interests lie at nanophotonics in the thermodynamical limit.
