Biography

Christina Sharp is Deputy Editor at Wiley, where she oversees the editorial development and peer review of research in photonics and advanced materials for the journals Laser & Photonics Reviews, Advanced Optical Materials, Nanophotonics, and Advanced Photonics Research. Christina completed her PhD in physics at the University of Exeter in 2023, focusing on structured light and holographic optical tweezers. She previously earned a Master’s degree in physics from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2019, where her research explored plasmonics in metallic nanostructures and the excitation dynamics of quantum dots. She joined Wiley in 2023 and became Deputy Editor in 2025. Since moving into publishing, Christina has developed a strong interest in research integrity and its role in ensuring transparency, trust, and accountability across all stages of the scientific publication process.

Website

https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/

Affiliation

United Kingdom

Category

Debate speaker, 2026

Biography

Anat Levin is a Professor at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion, Israel, doing research in the field of computational imaging. She received a Ph.D. in computer science from the Hebrew University in 2006. During the years 2007- 2009 she was a postdoc at MIT CSAIL, and during 2009-2016 she was an Assistant and Associate Prof. at the department of Computer Science and Applied Math, the Weizmann Inst. of Science.

Prof. Levin has received numerous awards for her research, including the CVRP PAMI young researcher award in 2013; the eurographics young researcher award in 2010; the eurographics outstanding technical contributions award in 2024; the Blavatnik award in 2018; and 3 ERC grants.

Website

https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/

Affiliation

Technion, Israel

Category

Keynote speaker, 2026

Biography

Iñigo Liberal is an associate professor at the Institute of Smart Cities (ISC) at the Public University of Navarre (UPNA), where his research focuses on quantum optics with spatiotemporal metamaterials, thermal emission as well as near-zero-index (NZI) and epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) nanophotonics. He has been a visiting researcher at Aalto University (Finland), the University of Arizona (US), and worked as a postdoctoral fellow as at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). He was de recipient of “Juan de la Cierva”, “Ramón y Cajal” and ERC Starting Grant research fellowships. He was a 2023 Early Career Award from the journal Nanophotonics, and the 2022 Felsen award for excellence in electrodynamics.

Website

https://www.unavarra.es/pdi/?uid=9467&languageId=1

Affiliation

UPNA, Spain

Category

Invited speaker, 2026

Biography

Dorian Bouchet completed his PhD at the Institut Langevin (ESPCI Paris, France) between 2014 and 2017, where he focused on light–matter interactions at the nanoscale. He then pursued postdoctoral research on wave propagation in complex media, first at the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science at Utrecht University (the Netherlands), and later at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Physics (LIPhy) in Grenoble (Université Grenoble Alpes, France). Since 2023, he has been a CNRS researcher at LIPhy, where he studies the propagation and control of both optical and acoustic waves in complex scattering environments.

Website

https://dbouchet.github.io/

Affiliation

Université Grenoble Alpes, France

Category

Invited speaker, 2026

Biography

Sébastien M. Popoff is a CNRS Research Scientist (Chargé de recherche) at the Institut Langevin (ESPCI Paris, PSL University, CNRS) in Paris. His research focuses on wavefront shaping and the control of light propagation in complex media, in particular multimode optical fibers and strongly scattering materials, with applications ranging from high-capacity optical communications and endoscopic imaging to quantum optics, nano-optomechanics and optical computing.

He obtained his PhD in Physics from Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7) in 2011, for work carried out at Institut Langevin on the spatio-temporal control of light in complex media. From 2012 to 2014 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Applied Physics at Yale University, working with Hui Cao on wave transport and coherent control in disordered photonic systems. He then joined CNRS as a research fellow, first at Télécom ParisTech and subsequently at Institut Langevin, where he leads research on harnessing disorder and symmetries in multimode fibers and scattering media for imaging, sensing, secure communications and analog photonic information processing.

Website

https://www.institut-langevin.espci.fr/sebastien_popoff

Affiliation

Langevin Institute, ESPCI, Paris, France

Category

Invited speaker, 2026

Biography

Geoffroy Lerosey is co-founder and CEO/CSO of Greenerwave, a Paris-based deep-tech company pioneering reconfigurable metasurfaces to control electromagnetic waves energy-efficiently. With an engineering degree from ESPCI Paris and a PhD in physics from Université Paris Diderot, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley before joining CNRS at Institut Langevin.

Over more than a decade in academia, Geoffroy made fundamental advances in time-reversal methods, metamaterials, and wavefront shaping, resulting in over 100 scientific articles and 20 patents. His vision at Greenerwave builds on this expertise to deliver smart, low-power metasurface technologies for applications ranging from radar and satellite communications to IoT.

Website

https://www.greenerwave.com/about/team/

Affiliation

Paris, France

Category

Debate speaker, 2026

Biography

Richard Bowman is a URF & Reader in Optics, primarily interested in instrumentation, automation, and making science more accessible and transparent. His group’s focus is the OpenFlexure Project, which released open source hardware and software designs for an automated microscope in 2016, and has since grown to a global community project with hundreds of members. Thousands of microscopes have been made and used in over 60 countries spanning every continent, from quantum optics to medical research and community education. He is a passionate advocate for open hardware in science. Open hardware can make science more rigorous, transparent, and reproducible while also making it more accessible.

Richard started his research career working on holographic optical tweezers and high speed imaging for his PhD at Glasgow in 2008-12. He moved to Cambridge to take up a research fellowship for 4 years at the Nanophotonics Centre, led by Prof. Jeremy Baumberg. There, he worked on automated microspectroscopy of plasmonic nanostructures, and liquid crystal waveguide engineering. He moved to the University of Bath in 2017 to take up a University Prize Fellowship and shifted focus to work on the OpenFlexure Microscope before being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2018, and moving to Glasgow in 2022.

Website

https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/physics/staff/richardbowman/

Affiliation

University of Glasgow, UK

Category

Debate speaker, 2026

Biography

Website

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/themos-kallos

Affiliation

London, UK

Category

Debate speaker, 2026

Biography

Tom Vettenburg is a Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Dundee, where he was recently awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to start his research group on Computational Microscopy. This research interest started with his PhD on hybrid optical-digital imaging systems at the Imaging Concepts group at Heriot-watt University. He later translated these principles to microscopy at the Optical Manipulation group in St Andrews. Tom’s work on the Airy beam light-sheet microscopy of large samples resulted in a highly cited Nature Methods publication, multiple patents, and their subsequent commercialization. After a Marie Curie individual fellowship at UC3M in Madrid, he continued his research at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health and later at MIT. In 2017, Tom returned to the UK to work with Jacopo Bertolotti in Exeter. Today he leads the Computational Imaging group in Dundee, focussed on beating the scattering limits in microscopy.

Website

https://www.dundee.ac.uk/people/tom-vettenburg

Affiliation

University of Dundee, UK

Category

Invited speaker, 2026

Biography

Dr Tom Siday received a Master of Physics degree from the University of York (2015) and completed his PhD in Electronic & Electrical Engineering at University College London (2020). After his PhD, Tom spent 3 years (2019-2022) as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Regensburg, Germany, then returned to the UK as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Somerville College (2023-2024). Now, Tom is an Assistant Professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham.

Website

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/physics/siday-thomas

Affiliation

University of Birmingham, UK

Category

Invited speaker, 2026