WNCG welcomes its newest faculty member, Andrea Alu, Ph.D. Alu joined The University of Texas at Austin in January 2009 after receiving his Ph.D. (2007), M.S. (2003) and Laurea (2001) degrees from the University of Roma Tre (Italy), and working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in 2007-2008. Dr. Alu is the co-author of over 160 journal papers and 16 book chapters and is the co-inventor of three US Patents related to electromagnetics research. His current research interests span over a broad range of areas, including metamaterials and plasmonics, electromagnetics, optics and photonics, acoustics, cloaking and transparency, nanocircuits and nanostructures modeling, miniaturized antennas and nanoantennas, and RF antennas and circuits. Some of his research achievements have raised worldwide attention in both the scientific and news press, like in the case of metamaterial cloaking and optical nanocircuits and nanoantennas. Over the last few years, he has won several international research awards, such as the prestigious URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011), the SPIE Early Career Investigator Award (2012), an NSF CAREER award (2010), the AFOSR and the DTRA Young Investigator Awards (2010, 2011), the Leopold B. Felsen Award for Excellence in Electrodynamics (2008), Young Scientist Awards from URSI General Assembly (2005), URSI Commission B (2010, 2007 and 2004) and several others. His students have also received several best paper awards, including the 1st prize student paper award at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium in 2011. He serves as OSA Traveling Lecturer since 2010, as associate editor of Optics Express and of IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, and as a guest editor for several special issues in the areas of metamaterials and plasmomics.
