Nader Engheta

Many thanks to my friend, Dr. Dimitrios Tzarouchis, who has researched my academic genealogy and compiled this slide. The bottom row shows the physics branch of the academic tree, from Kirchhoff -> Lippmann -> Curie -> Langevin -> Brillouin -> Papas -> Engheta, and the top row shows the engineering branch, from Edison -> Fessenden -> Bennett -> King -> Papas -> Engheta. (One of my friends, Professor Francesco Monticone, brought to my attention that Reginald Fessenden also interacted with Nikola Tesla.)

I am grateful to three dear friends, Professor Andrea Alu, Professor Albert Polman, and Professor Pino Strangi, for organizing a wonderful workshop on Metamaterials at UPenn last week, on the occasion of my 70th birthday. Many friends, colleagues, collaborators, and some of the alumni from my group participated in this event, which included fascinating scientific talks and great friendship. I am thankful to all the participants. Special thanks to Andrea, Albert, Pino, Ms. Erin Dowling (the event and communication coordinator), and Ms. Danielle Kopicko (the director of our ESE department).

Our paper on Kapitza-inspired stabilization in electrical circuits was published in Physical Review Applied on August 8, 2025. In this work, inspired by Kapitza’s inverted pendulum problem, we explore how an analogous approach can be applied to non-Foster electrical circuits. In 1951, Nobel Laureate Pyotr Kapitza developed the mathematical basis and the theory behind the stabilization of an inverted pendulum that was being vibrated at its base with a high-frequency motion, launching the fields of vibrational mechanics and vibrational resonances.
For more details, please see our paper: Antonio Alex-Amor, Grigorii Ptitcyn, and Nader Engheta, Physical Review Applied, 24, 024022 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1103/85sy-qbk6

I am honored and humbled to be selected as a recipient of the 2025 Rolf Landauer Medal, which is given by the ETOPIM Association (The Elastic, Electrical, Transport, and Optical Properties of Inhomogeneous Media (ETOPIM) Association). This organization has been a forum for the exchange of ideas in various aspects of the science of complex media, dating back to 1977 with their first ETOPIM conference in Columbus, Ohio. Every three years, the medals are given to two recipients. This year, I was one of the recipients and received the medal on June 16, 2025, at the ETOPIM13 conference in New York City.

Our most recent work, published in Nature Communications. In this work, we presented an idea for “freezing”, amplifying, and then “thawing” electromagnetic waves using temporal non-Foster metastructures. For more details, please see: Victor Pacheco-Pena, Yasaman Kiasat, Diego M. Solis, Brian Edwards, and Nader Engheta, Nature Communications 16:2757, March 20, 2025, https://rdcu.be/eelKT

A metastructure that designs metastructures: We have built this metastructure that can operate as a programmable wave-based analog computing machine, performing reconfigurable matrix inversion, root finding, and constraint optimization/inverse design. Our paper was published in Nature Communications on January 21, 2025. Many thanks to Dimitrios Tzarouchis and Brian Edwards. For details, please see: https://rdcu.be/d63Jb

The 632nm Podcast hosts interviewed me on September 21, 2024, covering various topics ranging from my research journey, my fascination with wave physics, scientific curiosity, optics and AI, and more. The video is around two hours long, but you can get to the different sections at the time stamps shown in the link below.
https://youtu.be/yS2EHl4iH4c?t=59

Many thanks to the 632nm hosts, Dr. Mikhail Shalaginov, Dr. Xinghui Yin, and Dr. Michael Dubrovsky, for their great efforts and kind invitation to me for this interview.
02:19 Fascination with Electromagnetics
03:14 Journey from Tehran to Caltech
05:39 Exploring Chirality and Metamaterials
08:21 Innovations in Polarization Imaging
36:12 Exploring Antennas and Metatronics
36:46 Dream Job in the Tech Industry
37:24 Optics and Artificial Intelligence
39:44 Brain Waves and Neuroscience
53:20 Optical Computing vs. Electronics
01:15:55 Exploring Optical and Electronic Constraints
01:17:47 Optical Computing: Efficiency and Challenges
01:20:58 Historical Insights and Modern Applications
01:26:20 Nonlinearity in Optical Systems
01:32:59 Future Directions and Advice for Young Researchers

Our work has been selected for the cover of the Optics and Photonics News (OPN) in December 2024. This work, which is about vector-matrix multiplication at the speed of light, has been chosen by the OPN as one of the highlights and breakthroughs of optics in this past year. Many thanks to the coauthors Vahid Nikkhah, Ali Pirmoradi, Farshid Ashtiani, Brian Edwards, and Firooz Aflatouni. For details, please see https://www.optica-opn.org/home/articles/volume_35/december_2024/extras/vector–matrix_multiplication_at_the_speed_of_light/
Cover illustration credit: Ella Marushchenko (Ella Maru Studio)

Here is the YouTube video of my TEDx talk at UPenn on April 6, 2024. Many thanks to the TEDxPenn team for their great efforts.

Doing Math at the Speed of Light | Nader Engheta | TEDxPenn Professor Engheta’s talk explores the frontier of optical computing, tracing the evolution from the ENIAC to cutting-edge nanoscale devices. Highlighting the...

I am deeply honored and humbled to receive the 2024 Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. Here are some photos from the awards ceremony in Florence, Italy last night.
Photos taken by: Professor Andrea Alu (CUNY) and Professor Stefano Maci (U. of Siena).

We are on the cover of the April 2024 issue of journal Optical Materials Express for our invited paper: Victor Pacheco-Peña and Nader Engheta, "Spatiotemporal cascading of dielectric waveguides," Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 1062-1073, April 1, 2024. For more information, please see https://doi.org/10.1364/OME.516262