Light-Matter Interactions Towards the Nanoscale

Dr. Cesaria graduated in Physics cum laude in 2008 and received her Ph.D. degree in Physics in 2012 at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy). From then on, she worked for the University of Florence and the IMM-CNR Institute (unit of Lecce-Italy). Currently, she is a Research Fellow at the Physics Department of the University of Salento. Since 2013 she contributed to the organization of the biannual Spectroscopy School held at the Majorana Foundation (Erice, Italy) and to studies on white-light emitting nanophosphors as a Visiting Scholar at Boston College (MA, USA). Her main research experiences include itinerant ferromagnetism, pulsed laser deposition of bulk and nanostructured inorganic/organic materials, microfluidics, liposomes, colloidal lithography, gold nanoholes, inorganic perovskites, and neutron detectors.Antonio Calà Lesina is an Associate Professor (tenure-track) at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, since 2020. His research interests focus on nanophotonics design, topology optimization, and large-scale multiphysics simulation. He obtained his B.Sc. in electronics engineering (2006) and M.Sc. in telecommunications engineering (2009) from the University of Catania, Italy, and his Ph.D. in computational electromagnetics (2013) from the University of Trento, Italy. From 2013 to 2020, he was a researcher at the University of Ottawa, Canada, working on computational nanophotonics, plasmonic colouring, and nonlinear/tunable optical metasurfaces. He attended three NATO Institutes on nanophotonics in Erice, Italy, in 2015, 2017 and 2019 (the latter as a member of the organizing team). Prof. Collins received his Ph.D. from Boston College in 1987, and has been a member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Wheaton College since 1989. His research interests are in the general area of the interaction of radiation with matter. He is an experimental physicist trained in the field of luminescence spectroscopy of solids doped with transition metal and rare earth ions. Specific areas of interest include energy transfer, nonradiative processes, luminescence in nanosystems, and plasmonic effects on radiative and non-radiative processes of excited ions in solids. Prof. Collins has co-edited several books and journal volumes on topics such as spectroscopy of solids, nano-optics, biophotonics, and visible and infrared phosphors, and has authored or co-authored numerous articles and book chapters.