QEOD Thesis Prizes
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.
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.
