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

Biography

Georgia T. Papadakis studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece, 2006-2011). She then moved to CERN (Switzerland), in 2011, where she worked in particle accelerator designs. In 2012, she moved to Los Angeles, California (USA), where she carried out her doctoral studies in the area of nanophotonics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She investigated “metamaterials” at visible and infrared wavelengths. In 2018, she moved to Stanford University, where she was a TomKat Postdoctoral Fellow in Sustainable Energy. There, Georgia worked on heat-to-electricity generation with thermophotovoltaic systems. In 2021, she moved to Barcelona, where she started her tenure-track position as a Group Leader at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO). At ICFO, Georgia leads the group of Thermal Photonics.

Georgia is the recipient of the Materials Research Society Best Student Award, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, the Tomkat Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University, the Princeton Pathway Into the Academy Fellowship and the la Caixa Postdoctoral Junior Leader Fellowship. Currently, Georgia’s group investigates ways to utilize thermal radiation for recycling heat and generating energy in a clean ways. Recently, Georgia and her group have been awarded the Best Early Career Paper Award in the Journal of Applied Physics, and the Early Career Award from the Journal Nanophotonics (De Gruyter).

Website

https://www.icfo.eu/research-group/31/thermal/home/437/

Affiliation

ICFO, Spain

Category

Invited speaker, 2026

Biography

Dr Caroline Müllenbroich is a Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Glasgow, where she leads a research team developing advanced optical microscopy techniques for cardiac imaging, including light-sheet, three-photon, and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy. She studied Physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and obtained her PhD from the Institute of Photonics at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, in 2012, focusing on adaptive optics in advanced microscopy. She then joined the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS) in Florence, Italy, implementing confocal light-sheet microscopy for structural whole-brain and functional calcium imaging. From 2016, she was a researcher at the Italian National Institute of Optics (CNR-INO) before moving to Glasgow in 2018 to establish her current group.

Website

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

Affiliation

University of Glasgow, UK

Category

Invited speaker, 2026