Since 2007 up to four EPS/QEOD Thesis Prizes are awarded to reward excellence in PhD research and scientific communication in the area of quantum electronics and optics related to a PhD thesis work defended in the two years prior to the conference from June to June. These Prizes are awarded for fundamental and applied aspects. The prize winners are each to receive a diploma and 1000 euros.

2025 EPS QEOD - Thesis Prizes

Fundamental aspects
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The 2025 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Joel Kuttruff, University of Konstanz, Department of Physics, Germany for contributions to ultrafast electron microscopy and nanophotonics, with a focus on attosecond and sub-nanometer resolution imaging. 
Biography
Joel Kuttruff

Joel Kuttruff is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He earned his Ph.D. at the same institution under the supervision of Prof. Peter Baum, specializing in ultrafast electron microscopy and nanophotonics, and graduated summa cum laude. 

He previously completed his M.Sc. in Physics with research focused on ultrafast spectroscopy, working with Prof. Nicolò Maccaferri (Umeå University, Sweden) and Prof. Daniele Brida (University of Luxembourg). He obtained his B.Sc. working on plasmonics with Prof. Stefan Maier (now at Monash University, Melbourne). 

His research is dedicated to advancing ultrafast electron microscopy as a tool for investigating dynamic processes on the nanoscale, with particular emphasis on resolving ultrafast phenomena in materials science and photonics. 

 

Fundamental aspects
11.01.2024, Mitarbeiterportrait - Valerio Di Giulio. Foto: Swen Pförtner / Max-Planck-Institut für Multidisziplinäre Naturwissenschaften
The 2025 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Valerio Di Giulio, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences,Göttingen, Germany,  for theoretical advances in quantum optics with free electrons, including pioneering contributions to electron coherence and the application of nanophotonics to electron–positron pair production. 
Biography
Valerio Di Giulio
Valerio Di Giulio earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theoretical physics with honors from La Sapienza University. During his master’s, he explored quantum foundations under Prof. Fabio Sciarrino.
In 2018, he started his PhD at ICFO with Prof. F. Javier García de Abajo, supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. His research focused on tailoring light-matter phenomena via nanophotonics techniques and on probing and generating quantum-light states in photonic structures with free electrons. In 2024, his PhD thesis received the ICFO PhD Thesis Award. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Claus Ropers at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Göttingen, studying ultrafast control of electron-beam phase space densities through structured light
and engineered photonic environments.ntarctica.
Applied aspects
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The 2025 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for applied aspects is awarded to  Urban Senica, ETH Zurich, Institute of Quantum Electronics 
Switzerland or experimental contributions to integrated terahertz photonics, including the development of planarized quantum cascade lasers and inverse-designed devices, enabling broadband frequency combs, soliton generation, and effective ultrafast pulse emission.


Biography
Urban Senica

Urban Senica is presently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in the group of Prof. Marko Loncar, where he conducts research on integrated nonlinear photonics with thin-film lithium niobate and semiconductor lasers. He completed his Ph.D. in Physics at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Giacomo Scalari and Prof. Jérôme Faist, where he developed an integrated photonics platform based on planarized terahertz quantum cascade lasers, frequency combs, microwave and passive components, for which he was awarded the ETH Medal. His previous research experience includes working on nanowire lasers at TU Munich, radiation-hard semiconductor particle detectors at CERN, and silicon solar cells at the University of Ljubljana.

Applied aspects
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The 2025 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Dariia O. Herasymova, Institute of Radio-Physics and Electronics, NAS of Ukraine, Kharkiv, Ukraine for the development of effective modelling to investigate diffraction radiation from nanowire configurations.


Biography
Dariia O. Herasymova

Dariia Herasymova earned her PhD in Physics and Astronomy in March 2024 at the Laboratory of Micro and Nano Optics of the Institute of Radio-Physics and Electronics, National Academy of Science of Ukraine, Kharkiv, Ukraine under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Nosich and Dr. Sergii Dukhopelnykov. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher on diffraction radiation, optical antennas and lasing. Dariia earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Optoelectronics and Photonics from the Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics.

 Dariia’s ongoing work is concentrated on the accurate modeling, with analytical-numerical techniques, of the diffraction radiation, including the Smith-Purcell effect, of the modulated electron beams in the presence of micro and nano-size dielectric, metal and graphene obstacles as well as finite gratings composed of these scatterers, in the visible and THz ranges.


2023 EPS QEOD - Thesis Prizes

Fundamental aspects
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The 2023 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Andrea Schirato, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, for having introduced spatially-resolved models for the hot carrier ultrafast dynamics and inherent photothermal nonlinearities, disclosing nonequilibrium regimes so far unexplored in nanophotonics.  


Biography
Andrea Schirato

The 2023 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Andrea Schirato, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, for having introduced spatially-resolved models for the hot carrier ultrafast dynamics and inherent photothermal nonlinearities, disclosing nonequilibrium regimes so far unexplored in nanophotonics.

 

Fundamental aspects
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The 2023 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to Shima Rajabali, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, for his thesis investigating the limits of interaction between light and matter at terahertz frequencies in a highly light-matter coupled system shrunk to the nanoscale.


Biography
Shima Rajabali

Shima Rajabali is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, specializing in integrated lithium niobate photonics for wireless communications. She has been awarded two postdoctoral fellowships, the Harvard Quantum Initiative and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Shima earned her Ph.D. from ETH Zurich, Switzerland in December 2021, where she focused on exploring the ultrastrong interaction between light and matter at terahertz frequencies at the nanoscale. Her research led to the discovery of a physical limit to increasing coupling strength and the development of an innovative confocal system to resolve the far-field transmission of a single subwavelength meta-atom. After her Ph.D., as a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL, she worked on “Lithium Niobate-based on-chip spectroscopy.” Shima obtained her BSc and MSc in Electronics from the University of Tehran, Iran.

 

Applied aspects
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The 2023 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Gur Lubin, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, for introducing a new type of spectroscopy, Heralded Spectroscopy, and applying it to reveal hitherto inaccessible photophysics of multiple-photon quantum emitters.


Biography
Gur Lubin

Gur Lubin received his Ph.D. in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2023 under the mentorship of Prof. Dan Oron. His doctorate pioneered a novel experimental method, Heralded Spectroscopy, revealing hidden aspects of nanocrystal light-matter interaction and supporting unprecedented access to investigating quantum few-photon sources. For his contributions to the field Gur has been awarded several prizes, including the Dostrovsky Excellence Prize and the SPIE - Pico Quant Young Investigator Award. Gur's work lies at the confluence of quantum optics, nanophotonics, and spectroscopy, especially their integration to provide a deeper photophysical understanding of quantum light emitters.

Applied aspects
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The 2023 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Sebastian Ecker, Quantum Technology Laboratories GmbH, Vienna, Austria, for theoretical and experimental investigations of the use of high-dimensional quantum information encoding to improve entanglement distribution in the presence of noise and loss.


Biography
Sebastian Ecker

Sebastian Ecker earned his master’s degree at the TU Vienna in Technical Physics, where he studied high-dimensional entanglement distribution over intra-city free-space links in the group of Rupert Ursin under the supervision of Anton Zeilinger. He then enrolled at the University of Vienna for his PhD, which he conducted at the IQOQI Vienna in the group of Rupert Ursin under the supervision of Marcus Huber. His PhD thesis is devoted to noise-resilient entanglement distribution using high-dimensional quantum states. He has been involved in several experimental feasibility studies involving terrestrial free-space links and participated in the 77th ESA Parabolic Flight Campaign. Towards the end of his PhD, he acted as visiting scientist for the ESA, where he identified future quantum technologies for space-based QKD. He currently works at Quantum Technology Laboratories GmbH (qtlabs) as senior scientist and consultant.

 

2021 EPS QEOD - Thesis Prizes

Applied aspects
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The 2021 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for applied aspects is awarded to 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.  


Biography
Maxim Karpov

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.

 

Applied aspects
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The 2021 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for applied aspects is awarded to 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.


Biography
Felipe Pedreros Bustos

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.

Fundamental aspects
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The 2021 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to 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.


Biography
P. André D. Gonçalves

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.

Fundamental aspects
renwen

The 2021 EPS-QEOD Thesis Prize for fundamental aspects is awarded to 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.


Biography
Renwen Yu

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.