Award Winners
PROF. DR. OLIVIER ALLIX
École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, France
Olivier Allix’ researches pertain to Simulation-Based Engineering Science. That is the discipline that provides the scientific and mathematical basis for the simulation of engineered systems and aims at proposing and developing methods and concepts to solve industrial challenges.
His main activities concern the modeling of composites: damage crash …, multiscale approaches for non-linear structural mechanics (buckling, cracks propagation …), inverse approaches modeling and the objective prediction of failure in dynamics. Current researches concern non-intrusive computational techniques in order to enrich industrial simulations with physical based models. In cooperation with Professor Wriggers from Leibniz University, he plans to work on damage mechanics in conjunction with the virtual element methods, a new discretization scheme in engineering.



PROF. DR. THOMAS BAUMGARTNER
York University, Canada
Thomas Baumgartner's research program targets the fundamental design of next-generation organic, hydrocarbon-based materials for practical applications that lower humanity's anthropogenic carbon footprint. The overarching theme is the efficient and sustainable use, conversion, and/or storage of energy via tailor-made chemical synthesis. To this end, the research in Professor Baumgartner's group covers the full breadth of materials chemistry encompassing imaging, measuring, modelling, and manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular scale. The main application areas involve the development of novel materials potentially to be used in batteries for large-scale grid storage of solar and wind energy, as well as the design of functional materials that enable efficient light-matter interactions for sustainable energy applications, such as organic light-emitting diodes.



PROF. DR. STEVEN CUNDIFF
University of Michigan, USA
PROF. DR. HUI DENG
University of Michigan, USA
PROF. DR. ANDREW FORBES
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Andrew Forbes received his PhD (1998) from the University of Natal (South Africa), and subsequently spent several years as an applied laser physicist, first in a technology start-up where he was Technical Director, and later as Chief Researcher and Research Group Leader of the Mathematical Optics group at the CSIR. Andrew is presently a Distinguished Professor within the School of Physics at the U. Witwatersrand (South Africa) where he has established a new laboratory for Structured Light. Andrew is active in promoting photonics in Africa, a founding member of the Photonics Initiative of South Africa and initiator of South Africa’s Quantum Roadmap. He is a Fellow of both SPIE and the OSA, an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and holds an A-rating by the South African NRF. He holds honorary professor positions in Stellenbosch, China and Japan, and in 2015 won a national award for his contributions to photonics in South Africa. In 2020 he was awarded the Georg Forster award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Andrew spends his time having fun with the taxpayers’ money, exploring structured light in lasers as well as classical and quantum optics.



PROF. DR. JULIAN GALE
Curtin University, Australia
Professor Julian Gale obtained his first degree from the University of Oxford in Natural Sciences (Chemistry), where he continued on to study for a DPhil in the Department of Chemical Crystallography. After a postdoctoral position at the Royal Institution of Great Britain he moved to Imperial College London as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and subsequently Reader in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry. In 2003, he moved to his current location, Curtin University, as a Premier's Research Fellow and now holds the position of John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Computational Chemistry. Recently he was award an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship and made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Research interests include the development and application of computational techniques to problems in areas including materials chemistry, crystallisation, geochemistry and mineralogy.



PROF. DR. YURI S. KIVSHAR
Australian National University, Australia
PROF. DR. THUC-QUYEN THAI NGUYEN
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is the Director of the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids (CPOS) and the professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Professor Nguyen received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanocenter at Columbia University. She joined the faculty of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at UCSB in July 2004.
Recognition for her research includes the 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the 2006 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2007 Harold Plous Award, the 2008 Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, the 2009 Alfred Sloan Research Fellows, the 2010 National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellows, the 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award, the 2016 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2019 Hall of Fame - Advanced Materials, the 2019 Beaufort Visiting Scholar, St John's College, Cambridge University, the 2019 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the 2015-2019 World's Most Influential Scientific Minds; Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers in Materials Science by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics. Her current research interests are doping and charge transport in organic semiconductors, bioelectronics, and device physics of organic solar cells, ratchets, transistors, and photodetectors.



PROF. DR. BATMANATHAN DAYANAND REDDY
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Daya Reddy is a graduate of the Universities of Cape Town (UCT) and Cambridge, and holds the South African Research Chair in Computational Mechanics at UCT. Starting in 1999, he served a seven-year term as dean of the faculty of science at UCT. His research is concerned with analysis and computation in continuum mechanics, motivated largely by applications in materials science and biomechanics.
Daya Reddy was a founder member in 2003 of AIMS, the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), a pan-African network with centres for graduate education, research and outreach in six African countries. He is actively involved in bodies that are engaged at the science-policy interface and is currently President of the International Science Council.
His various awards include the Order of Mapungubwe, presented by the President of South Africa for distinguished contributions to science, and of the Georg Forster Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.



PROF. DR. SAMUEL I. STUPP
Northwestern University, USA
PROF. DR. ANDREW M. WEINER
Purdue University, USA
Andrew Weiner is the Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. His research focuses on broadband photonic signal processing, with relevance to ultrafast optics, fiber optics, ultrabroadband radio-frequency photonics, nonlinear integrated optics, and quantum photonics. He is especially well known for his pioneering work on programmable generation of arbitrary ultrashort pulse waveforms, which has found application both in fiber optic networks and in ultrafast optical science laboratories around the world. His most recent work emphasizes (a) high repetition rate frequency comb technologies (both electro-optic combs and microresonator Kerr combs) and (b) multi-frequency and time-frequency quantum optics, including integrated photonics quantum sources. Weiner is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Inventors, served for six years as Editor-in-chief of Optics Express, and is author of the graduate level textbook Ultrafast Optics.



PROF. DR. JUN YE
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
Jun Ye is a Fellow of JILA and a Fellow of NIST. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. His research focuses on the frontiers of light-matter interactions and includes precision measurement, quantum physics and ultracold matter, optical frequency metrology, and ultrafast science. He has co-authored over 300 scientific papers and has delivered over 500 invited talks. Awards and honors include N.F. Ramsey Prize (APS), Rabi Award (IEEE), US Presidential Rank (Distinguished) Award, three Gold Medals from the U.S. Commerce Department, Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Frew Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, I.I. Rabi Prize (APS), European Frequency and Time Forum Award, Carl Zeiss Research Award, William F. Meggers Award and Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America, Arthur S. Flemming Award, Presidential Early Career Award, Friedrich Wilhem Bessel Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Samuel Wesley Stratton Award, and Jacob Rabinow Award from NIST. Group web page, http://jila.colorado.edu/YeLabs/


