Andrea Alù

Andrea Alù is the Einstein Professor of Physics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering at The City College of New York. He is also Director of the Photonics Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center. His work focuses on metamaterials, plasmonics, and nonreciprocal devices, with applications in defense, communications, and environmental engineering. Alù pioneered invisibility cloaking and nonreciprocal acoustic circulators.

Education: Ph.D., M.S., and undergraduate degrees from the University of Roma Tre (Rome), with postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously held the Temple Foundation Endowed Professorship at the University of Texas at Austin.

Research interests span metamaterials, plasmonics, and their applications in thermal management, acoustics, and quantum phenomena. His work bridges theoretical and experimental physics, with innovations in radiative cooling and parity-time symmetry systems.

• Recipient of the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award (2015)
• Three-time finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards (2016-2018)
• Fellow of OSA, IEEE, APS, and SPIE
• Simons Foundation Investigator in Physics

Leadership roles include directing the AFOSR MURI project on non-reciprocal metamaterials and serving as a distinguished lecturer for IEEE and OSA. He holds over a dozen patents and co-authored >500 publications.

Labs/Teams: Head of the Alù Lab, previously led the Metamaterials and Plasmonic Research Laboratory at UT Austin. Active in the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Wave Phenomena.