Nader Engheta is the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, with affiliation in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering (primary appointment), Bioengineering (secondary appointment), Physics and Astronomy (secondary appointment), and Materials Science and Engineering (secondary appointment). He received the BS degree (with highest rank) in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran, the MS degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, California. After spending one year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Caltech and four years as a Senior Research Scientist at Kaman Sciences Corporation’s Dikewood Division in Santa Monica, California, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he rose through the ranks and is currently H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor. He was the graduate group chair of electrical engineering from July 1993 to June 1997.
He has received numerous awards for his research including the 2020 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics (UK), the 2020 Max Born Award from OPTICA (formerly OSA), Induction to the Canadian Academy of Engineering as an International Fellow (2019), the Ellis Island Medal of Honor from the Ellis Island Honors Society (2019), the 2022 Hermann Anton Haus Lecture at MIT, the IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology from the IEEE Nanotechnology Council (October 2018), 2017 & 2018 Highly Cited Researcher (Web of Science, Clarivate Analytics, Top 1% Researchers most cited), the 2017 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award from the IEEE Photonics Society (October 2017), the 2017 Photonics Media Industry Beacons Award, the 2015 Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the 2015 Gold Medal from SPIE (the international society for optics and photonics), the 2015 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (also known as National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow (NSSEFF)) Award from US Department of Defense, the 2015 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award, the 2015 Wheatstone Lecture at the King’s College London, the 2014 Balthasar van der Pol Gold Medal from the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the 2013 Inaugural SINA (“Spirit of Iranian Noted Achiever”) Award in Engineering, the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Key Award from the IEEE Philadelphia Section, the 2012 IEEE Electromagnetics Award (one of the IEEE Technical Field Awards), the 2008 George H. Heilmeier Award for Excellence in Research from the SEAS University of Pennsylvania, the Fulbright Naples Chair Award, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award, the UPS Foundation Distinguished Educator term Chair, the Scientific American Magazine 50 Leaders in Science and Technology in 2006, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He is a Fellow of nine international scientific and technical societies, i.e., IEEE, American Physical Society (APS), OPTICA (formerly OSA), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), SPIE, Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale (URSI), Materials Research Society (MRS), Institute of Physics (UK) and National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He has also received several teaching awards including the Christian F. and Mary R. Lindback Foundation Award, the S. Reid Warren, Jr. Award (two times), and the W. M. Keck Foundation’s Engineering Teaching Excellence Award.
He has received the Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Science in Technology honoris causa) from Aalto University in Finland (conferred on October 7, 2016), the Honorary Doctorate (Dr. rer. nat. h.c.) from University of Stuttgart, Germany (conferred on November 18, 2016), and the Honorary Doctoral Degree from Ukraine’s National Technical University Kharkov Polytechnic Institute (conferred on November 3, 2017).
His current research activities span a broad range of areas including optics, photonics, metamaterials, electrodynamics, microwaves, nano-optics, graphene photonics, imaging and sensing inspired by eyes of animal species, microwave and optical antennas, and physics and engineering of fields and waves.
He is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of the Science magazine, and is on the editorial boards of the journals American Chemical Society (ACS) Photonics, Applied Physics Letters (APL) Photonics, Nanophotonics, IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation, and eLight. He was on the editorial boards of many journals in the past.
He was the Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics in 2012, and was the Vice Chair for this conference in 2010. He has been the co-chair of the SPIE symposium on “Metamaterials, Metadevices and Metasystems” for several years.
He has co-edited (with R. W. Ziolkowski) the book Metamaterials: Engineering and Physics Explorations, Wiley-IEEE Press, June 2006.
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (with a minor in Physics), Caltech.
MS in Electrical Engineering, Caltech.
BS in Electrical Engineering (highest rank), University of Tehran.
His current research activities span a broad range of areas including optics, photonics, metamaterials, electrodynamics, microwaves, nano-optics, graphene photonics, imaging and sensing inspired by eyes of animal species, microwave and optical antennas, and physics and engineering of fields and waves. (Click here to see the Research Program).
View Prof. Engheta's publication list here.
V. Nikkhah, A. Pirmoradi, F. Ashtiani, B. Edwards, F. Aflatouni, and N. Engheta, “Inverse-designed low-index-contrast structures on silicon photonics platform for vector-matrix multiplication,” Nature Photonics, published online February 16, 2024. Vol. 18, pp. 501-508, May 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-024-01394-2 J. Hu, D. Mengu, D. Tzasouchis, B. Edwards, N. Engheta, and A. Ozcan, “Diffractive optical computing in free space,” Nature Communications, Vol. 15, 1525, February 20, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45982-w T. Gong, I. Liberal, B. Spreng, M. Camacho, N. Engheta and J. Munday, “The effects of epsilon-near-zero modes on the Casimir interaction between ultrathin films,” Physical Review Letters, Vol. 130, 196901, May 12, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.196901 V. Pacheco-Pena and N. Engheta, “Spatiotemporal cascading of dielectric waveguides,” Optical Materials Express, feature issue on “Time-varying artificial photonic metastructures”, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 1062-1073, April 1, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1364/OME.516262 Y.-Y. Cai, A. Fallah, S. Yang, Y. C. Choi, J. Xu, A. Stein, J. M. Kikkawa, C. B. Murray, N. Engheta, and C. R. Kagan, “Open- and close-packed shape-engineered polygonal nanoparticle metamolecules with tailaorabl eFano resonances,” Advanced Materials, appeared online May 11, 2023, Vol. 35, 2301323. https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202301323 N. Engheta, “Four-dimensional optics using time-varying metamaterials,” a perspective article in Science, Vol. 379, Issue 6638, pp. 1190-1191, March 24, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adf1094
Primary appointment is in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University of Pennsylvania.