Nader Engheta currently the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, affiliated with the departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Bioengineering, and Physics and Astronomy.
He has made significant contributions to the fields of metamaterials, transformation optics, plasmonic optics, nanophotonics, graphene photonics, nano-materials, nanoscale optics, nanoantennas and miniaturized antennas, physics and reverse-engineering of polarization vision in nature, bio-inspired optical imaging, fractional paradigm in electrodynamics, and electromagnetics and microwaves.
He is the originator of the new area of optical metatronics, i.e., metamaterial-based optical nano circuitry, in which properly designed nano structures function as “lumped’ optical circuit elements such as optical capacitors, optical inductors and optical resistors. These are the building blocks for the metatronic circuits operating with light. This concept has been recently verified and realized experimentally by him and his research group at the University of Pennsylvania. This provides a new circuit paradigm for information processing at the nanoscale.
He and his group have pioneered and developed several exciting areas and concepts in the fields of metamaterials and plasmonic optics, including, (1) ‘extreme-parameter metamaterials’ and ‘epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) metamaterials’; (2) the concept of Omega structures, as one of the building blocks of structured materials,; (3) ultrathin cavities and waveguides, with sizes beyond diffraction limits, providing possibilities for unprecedented miniaturization of devices; (4) supercoupling phenomena between waveguides using low-permittivity ENZ metamaterials,; (5) extended Purcell effects in nano-optics using the ENZ phenomena, in which enhanced photon density of states occurs in a relatively large area with essentially uniform phase;(6) far-field subwavelength imaging lens based on ENZ hyperbolic metamaterials; (7) scattering-cancellation-based plasmonic cloaking and transparency,; (8) merging the field of graphene with the field of metamaterials and plasmonic optics in infrared regime, providing the roadmaps for one-atom-thick optical devices and one-atom-thick information processing,; (9) microwave artificial chirality; (10) “signal-processing” metamaterials and “meta-machine”, and (11) “digital” metamaterials.
He earned his Masters and PhD degrees from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.S. degree from the school of engineering (Fanni) of the University of Tehran.
Prof. George was the founding director of the Center for Electronic Imaging Systems, funded in part by the National Science Foundation under the S/IUCRC program, and also of the highly rated ARO-URI Center for Opto-Electronic Systems Research. Prior to this, he was director of The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester for more than four years. Previously he was a professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He received the B.S. degree with highest honors from the University of California at Berkeley, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics from the California Institute of Technology.
