Last week, optical physicist and Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF) Fellow, Professor Nader Engheta (class of 2015) was awarded the 2020 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize for “groundbreaking innovation and transformative contributions to electromagnetic complex materials and nanoscale optics, and for pioneering development of the fields of near-zero-index metamaterials, and material-inspired analogue computation and optical nanocircuitry”. Presented by the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World, the international award is given annually for “world-leading contributions to physics”. Professor Engheta is a Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering and his work has pioneered several fields in optics including unifying electronic and optics with nanocircuit elements for photons and electrons and he has led the development of phenomena such as metamaterial cloaking. The VBFF has largely supported some of Professor Engeta’s recent work resulting to ~40 publications. One of Professor Engtha’s most impactful work, “Photonic doping of epsilon-near-zero media” (supported by the VBFF and published in Science) has paved a new pathway for engineering electromagnetic metamaterials and reconfigurable optical systems.
The article could be found here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6329/1058