Plenary Speakers

Andrew studied Physics at the University of Natal (South Africa) and received his PhD in 1998 in lasers/optics. From 1999 he spent several years working in a technology start-up, much of the time as Technical Director, where he helped build a private laser company from humble beginnings of just a few friends to an enterprise employing more than 70 staff. The products are now in use at blue chip institutes around the world, including Lockheed Martin (USA), BAE (UK), ENEA (Italy), NASA (USA) and Dassault (France). The company won many technology awards, attracted significant local and foreign investment, and was purchased outright by the USA enterprise Par Systems Inc.

In 2005 Andrew decided to return to more research orientated activities and joined the CSIR National Laser Centre where he started two new research groups: first the User Facility – a set of laboratories for advancing photonics in South Africa through engagement with local universities, and later in 2007 the Mathematical Optics group. During this time Andrew pioneered the use of digital holography for the creation and detection of optical modes, resulting in many high-profile journal papers, patents and commercialisation projects. In 2015 Andrew joined the University of the Witwatersrand on the Distinguished Professor programme and has started a new laboratory that focuses on Structured Light and its applications.

Andrew sits on several international conference committees and leadership panels (SPIE, OSA, IEEE), chaired the SPIE international conference on Laser Beam Shaping, served on the Advisory Board for the OSA’s Siegman School on Lasers, Chaired the Editorial Board of the OSA periodical ‘Optics and Photonics News’ and is Editor-in-Chief of the UK’s Journal of Optics, while sitting on three other international journal boards. Andrew is an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, a founding member of the Photonics Initiative of South Africa, initiated the Quantum Roadmap for South Africa and a Fellow of SPIE, the OSA and the SAIP. He is reviewer for all the major physics and optics journals, including Nature and Science, for several national and international funding agencies, and is an active member of various science outreach and public awareness initiatives. Andrew holds honorary professorship positions at Stellenbosch University (South Africa), Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China)[#1 for optics] and Chiba University (Japan).

Andrew has edited and/or contributed to several books, proceedings and patents, published >200 scientific journal papers, and together with his students has presented over 500 orals or posters at conferences. He is an active populariser of science through numerous popular articles, television shows and radio contributions. Andrew and his students have won over 100 awards for outstanding contributions to science. In 2015 Andrew won the national NSTF Photonics award for his contribution to the field over the past decade, in 2018 he was awarded an “A rating” (top rating possible) from the South African National Research Foundation, and in 2020 won the Alexander von Humboldt Georg Forster Prize and Fellowship. He is the 2020 winner of the South African Institute of Physics Gold Medal, the highest award in physics in South Africa, making him the youngest winner to date. In 2021 he was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Award, the highest award for research from the university.

Dr. Radha Nagarajan is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Optical Engineering at Marvell. In this role, he manages the development of the company’s optical platform technology and products. Radha joined Marvell from Inphi, where he served as the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Platforms. Concurrently, he is also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore.

Radha has been awarded more than 250 US patents and is a Fellow of the IEEE, OPTICA (the Optical Society) and IET (UK). Over his career, he was awarded the IEEE/LEOS Aron Kressel Award, IPRM (Indium Phosphide and Related Materials) Award, and OPTICA David Richardson Medal, in recognition of breakthrough work in the development and manufacturing of large scale photonic integrated circuits. Radha was named to Electro Optics’ The Photonics100 2024 which honors the industry’s most innovative people, and in 2025, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his contributions to the advances in high-speed lasers and photonic integration technologies.

Radha holds a B.Eng. from the National University of Singapore, M.Eng. from the University of Tokyo, and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, all in Electrical Engineering.

Prof. Cheng-Wei Qiu holds the Provost’s Chair Professorship. He is Fellow of APS, Optica, SPIE and The Electromagnetics Academy, US. He is Foreign Fellow of Chinese Optical Society. He is Fellow of ASEAN Academy of Engineering and Technology. He is well known for his research in structured light and metasurfaces. He has published 500+ peer-reviewed journal papers, and as correspondence author, he has published in Science (4), Nature (7), Physical Review Letters (20+), PNAS (7), Nature Photonics (8), Nature Materials (5), Nature Nanotechnology (5), Nature Electronics (2), Nature Physics (2), Nature Communications (30+), Science Advances (11), Nature Reviews Physics (1), Nature Reviews Materials (2), Chemical Reviews (4), etc.

He was the recipient of the SUMMA Graduate Fellowship in Advanced Electromagnetics in 2005, IEEE AP-S Graduate Research Award in 2006, URSI Young Scientist Award in 2008, NUS Young Investigator Award in 2011, MIT TR35@Singapore Award in 2012, Young Scientist Award by Singapore National Academy of Science in 2013, Faculty Young Research Award in NUS 2013, SPIE Rising Researcher Award 2018, Young Engineering Research Award 2018, and Engineering Researcher Award 2021 in NUS, World Scientific Medal 2021 by Institute of Physics Singapore, and Achievement in Asia Award (Robert T. Poe Prize) 2023 by International Organization of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers, IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer 2023, and President’s Science Award 2023 in Singapore.

He was Highly Cited Researchers by Web of Science since 2019. His work has been selected as Top 10 Breakthroughs 2020 by Physics World, and Optics in 2021 & 2023 by Optica. As an overseas partner, he has been awarded China’s Top 10 Optical Breakthroughs for 5 times (2019, 2020, twice in 2021, 2023). He has served as Associate Editor for various journals such as JOSA B, PhotoniX, Photonics Research. Now he serves as Editor-in-Chief for eLight (IF: 27.2). He also serves in Editorial Advisory Board for Laser and Photonics Reviews, Advanced Optical Materials, and ACS Photonics.

Prof. Keller’s research interests are exploring and pushing the frontiers in ultrafast science and technology: ultrafast solid-state and semiconductor lasers, ultrashort pulse generation in the one to two optical cycle regime, frequency comb generation and stabilization, reliable and functional instrumentation for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) to X-ray generation, attosecond experiments using high harmonic generation, and attosecond sience.

More info you find:
https://ulp.ethz.ch/research.html

Ursula Keller was appointed an Associate Professor in March 1993 and in October 1997 she became a Full Professor in the Physics Department at ETH Zurich.

Ursula Keller was born in Zug, Switzerland, on June 21, 1959. She received the “”Diplom”” in Physics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 1984. From late 1984 to 1985 she worked on optical bistability at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland as a visiting scholar. She then earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics at Stanford University in California in 1987 and 1989, respectively. For her first year at Stanford, she held a Fulbright Fellowship, and for the following year she was an IBM Predoctoral Fellow. Her Ph.D. research demonstrated a novel high-speed optical measurement technique of charge and voltage in GaAs integrated circuits and low-noise ultrafast laser systems.

In 1989, she became a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, where she conducted research on photonic switching, ultrafast laser systems, and semiconductor spectroscopy. In March 1993 she was appointed as an Associate Professor in the Physics Department at ETH Zurich, and in October 1997 became a Full Professor.

Her research interests are exploring and pushing the frontiers in ultrafast science and technology. She invented the semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) which enabled passive modelocking of diode-pumped solid-state lasers and established ultrafast solid-state lasers for science and industrial applications. Pushed the frontier of few-cycle pulse generation and full electric field control at petahertz frequencies. Pioneered frequency comb stabilization from modelocked lasers, which was also noted by the Nobel committee for Physics in 2005. In time-resolved attosecond metrology she invented the attoclock which resolved the electron tunneling delay and observed the dynamical Franz-Keldysh effect in condensed matter for the first time.