Meet the speakers of ISWAMP 2021 below!
By clicking on their names a popup will open with a short bio and a link to their webpage.
Donna Strickland
Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester.
Strickland earned a B.Eng. from McMaster University and a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester. Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations.
Strickland served as the president of the Optical Society (OSA) in 2013 and is a fellow of OSA, SPIE, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society. She is an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Physics and an international member of the US National Academy of Science. Strickland was named a Companion of the Order of Canada.
group page: https://uwaterloo.ca/ultrafast-laser-group/
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University of Waterloo
Vitali Averbukh
Dr. Vitali Averbukh received PhD in chemistry from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 2001. He joined the Department of Physics of Imperial College London as an EPSRC fellow in 2010 and is currently a reader in molecular physics. Dr. Averbukh is a theoretician working on a broad range of subjects within molecular spectroscopy, from attosecond electron spectroscopy of Auger-type phenomena and hole migration to bioinformatics approaches to biomolecular mass-spectrometry. Dr. Averbukh has led the development of Fano-ADC family of methods for theoretical description of electronic decay in molecules and clusters and of the B-spline ADC method for attosecond dynamics of many-electron wavepackets. More recently, Dr. Averbukh has been leading the development of bioinformatics approaches to the two-dimensional partial covariance mass spectrometry (2D-PC-MS) – the new type of mass spectrometric measurement of unparalleled structural specificity.
group page: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/v.averbukh
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Imperial College London
Agapi Emmanouilidou
Dr. Agapi Emmanouilidou is a Professor of Physics at University College London. She obtained her BS from the University of Patras in Greece and her Ph.D from University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Emmanouilidou works on the interaction of atoms and molecules with lasers. Her group develops state-of-the-art semiclassical techniques to explore the correlated electron dynamics, formation of Rydberg states and the interplay of nuclear and electron motion in multi-electron and multi-center molecules. Dr. Emmanouilidou’s group is also interested in cutting edge quantum mechanical techniques to explore the interaction of UV and XUV radiation with atoms and molecules. One of the fascinating aspects of her work is the ability to predict new phenomena that can be verified by experimental results.
group page: http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucapaem/index.html
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University College London
Christian Ott
Dr. Christian Ott received his PhD in 2012 from Heidelberg University on attosecond interferometric techniques and strong-field control of two-electron dynamics, working in the independent research group of Prof. Thomas Pfeifer at MPIK. He has spent two years as a postdoc with Profs. Stephen Leone and Daniel Neumark, working on attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy of strongly correlated materials at the University of California at Berkeley, USA, sponsored by a Feodor Lynen postdoctoral fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. Since 2016 he is appointed staff scientist and group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, in the Quantum Dynamics and Control division of Prof. Thomas Pfeifer. His research interests include the fundamentals of absorption spectroscopy and the ultrafast control of light-matter interaction, using both lab-based (lasers & HHG) and large-facility (FEL) ultrafast light sources.
group page: https://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/mpi/en/research/scientific-divisions-and-groups/quantum-dynamicscontrol/research/excited-atomsmolecules-in-strong-fields-ag-ott
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Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics Heidelberg
Yuki Orimo
Dr. Yuki Orimo received a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Tokyo Department of Nuclear Engineering and Management, Japan, in 2020 on the first-principles simulation of photoelectron energy spectra under strong laser fields. Since 2020 he has been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo in Kenichi L. Ishikawa's group. His recent research interests are ab-initio simulations of molecules and solids under strong laser fields and quantum chemistry and quantum dynamics simulation with quantum computation.
personal page: https://www.atto.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/member-en/orimo_yuki-en.html
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University of Tokyo
Gil Porat
Dr. Gil Porat received his PhD in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Tel Aviv University in 2014. Followingly, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and a Research Associate in the group of Jun Ye at JILA, USA. Since 2018 he has been an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the University of Alberta, Canada. He is also an Adjunct Professor with the Department of Physics at the same university, since 2020.
Dr. Porat’s research is centered on the development of infrared, visible and ultraviolet frequency comb lasers and their uses in fundamental physics, industry and medical applications. One of his long term goals is creating tabletop systems that are complementary to large, accelerator-based ultraviolet sources such as synchrotrons and free electron lasers.
group page: http://www.ece.ualberta.ca/~gporat/
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University of Alberta, Edmonton
Olga Smirnova
Olga Smirnova graduated from the Physics Department of the Moscow State University in 1996 and received her PhD there in 2000, continuing as assistant professor. In 2003 she received the Lise-Meitner Fellowship of Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and joined the Vienna University of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2005 she moved to the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, Canada, where she became a permanent staff scientist in 2006. In 2009 she received the SAW award of the Leibniz society and moved to the Max Born Institute to establish her own Strong Field Theory research group, which she continues to lead. Since 2016 she also holds full professorship at the Technical University Berlin. In 2010 Olga has received the Karl-Scheel-Preis of Physikalischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin and in 2020 she has received the Ahmed Zewail Award in Ultrafast Science & Technology of the American Chemical Society. Olga’s current research focuses on imaging and control of ultrafast electron dynamics in atoms, solid state materials, and molecules, especially chiral molecules.
group page: http://staff.mbi-berlin.de/mbijtheory/
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Max Born Institute, Berlin
Christina Boemer
Dr. Christina Boemer received her PhD in physics from the University of Hamburg, Germany in 2020.
She conducted her PhD studies at the European X-ray Free Electron Laser, where she investigated parametric conversion of x-rays into optical photons. She currently continues her work at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY together with Prof. Nina Rohringer: exploring the emerging field of x-ray optical wave mixing phenomena. Her research convers sum- and difference frequency generation as well as parametric down-conversion in various regimes.
Ultimately, she aims to bring nonlinear x-ray conversion phenomena towards practical application - as novel probes of matter – covering nonlinear spectroscopy and imaging.
group page: https://tuxs.desy.de/
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DESY, Hamburg
Ludger Inhester
Dr. Ludger Inhester received a PhD in physics from the Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany, in 2013.
In 2014 he joined the center for Free-Electron Laser Science at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, as a postdoc and became a senior scientist in 2020.
His research interests are the theoretical description of the interaction of molecules with x-ray radiation. In particular, his focus is on intense x-ray radiation as created by x-ray free-electron lasers.
personal page: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ludger-Inhester
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DESY, Hamburg
Jean Marcel Ngoko Djiokap
Dr. Jean Marcel Ngoko Djiokap received a PhD in physics from the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), in 2010. Under the supervision of Professor Bernard Piraux, he developed analytical and numerical tools for the theoretical description of relativistic or nonrelativistic correlated atomic processes initiated either by light or by electron impact. Followingly, he moved to USA as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in the group of Professor Anthony F. Starace, where he carried out his research on strong-field physics and attosecond science. In 2014, he got promoted as a research assistant professor at UNL. Dr. Ngoko Djiokap group at UNL is interested in strong-field physics and attosecond science from atoms to condensed matter via molecules with a focus on correlated processes. Dr. Ngoko Djiokap's expertise is on developing both ab initio numerical and analytical quantum mechanical tools to uncover and predict new phenomena, and to analyze experimental results.
group page: https://unlcms.unl.edu/cas/physics/jngokodjiokap2/
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University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Mette Gaarde
Mette Gaarde is the Les and Dot Broussard Alumni Professor of Physics at Louisiana State University. She received her Ph.D. from Copenhagen University in Denmark, with much of her graduate and post-doctoral work performed at Lund University in Sweden. She is a Fellow of both the APS and the OSA, and is currently serving as Chair Elect of APS-DAMOP. Dr. Gaarde is a theorist working in several different areas of ultrafast AMO science; and is currently particularly interested in high harmonic generation in solids, ultrafast charge migration in molecules, and attosecond transient absorption and reshaping of XUV and X-ray pulses in matter.
group page: https://www.lsu.edu/physics/people/faculty/gaarde.php
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Louisiana State University
Tomoyuki Endo
Dr. Tomoyuki Endo received a PhD in chemistry from Nagoya University, Japan, in 2016. He joined as a postdoctoral researcher in a group of Prof. François Légaré at INRS-EMT, Canada. In 2018, he joined as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Ryuji Itakura’s group at Kansai Photon Science Institute, Japan, and is currently a researcher. His research interests include ultrafast imaging and coherent control of molecular dynamics in gas and liquid phases by using few-cycle or tailored intense laser fields.
group page: https://www.qst.go.jp/site/kansai-adprenglish/2879.html
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Kansai Photon Science Institute
Xiaochun Gong
Dr. Xiaochun Gong received a PhD in physics from East China Normal University of shanghai, China, in 2017, where he obtained the knowledge of electron-ion coincidence measurement in strong field physics from Prof. Jian Wu. He spent one year’s post-doc research in Prof. Hans Jakob Wörner’s group in ETHzürich, where he started his attosecond science research by constructing a new attosecond coincidence interferometer. He officially joined ECNU staff in 2017. Dr. Gong is interested in attosecond science from isolated atomic phase to condensed phase with the help of the advanced attosecond metrology through 3D-momenta and/or optical spectroscopy.
group page: https://xiaochungong.github.io/
official page: https://faculty.ecnu.edu.cn/_s29/gxc2_en/main.psp
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East China Normal University, Shanghai
Lorenz Cederbaum
Lorenz Cederbaum completed his doctoral studies in Chemistry in 1972 and completed his habilitation in Physics in 1976, both at the Technical University of Munich. In 1976, he joined the University of Freiburg as an Associate Professor of Physics, and in 1979, he moved to the University of Heidelberg as Professor of theoretical Chemistry. Since 2017, he occupies the position of Senior Professor for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg. He is a member of the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences and of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and is Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. He received two ERC Advanced Investigators Grants (2008, 2016) towards the study of ICD, and ETMD and ICEC and other related interatomic processes. He was awarded honorary doctorates in 2009 from Sofia University (Bulgaria), in 2012 from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and in 2016 from the University of Debrecen (Hungary). Among others, his research areas comprise the study of phenomena of electron correlation in molecules, clusters, and solids; multimode nuclear dynamics in molecules including conical intersections; atoms, and molecules in strong fields; Bose−Einstein condensation; and ultrafast electronic processes in chemical media.
group page: https://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de//cms/index.html
personal page: https://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de/cms/lenz.html
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University of Heidelberg
Alessandra Candian
Dr. Alessandra Candian received a PhD in Astrophysical chemistry from The University of Nottingham (United Kingdom) in 2012. After a visiting position at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (Spain) she joined the Leiden Observatory (The Netherlands) as a research associate in the interstellar medium group lead by Xander Tielens. In 2015 she was awarded a VENI fellowship from the Dutch Research Organization to conduce independent research at the Leiden Observatory. In 2019 she joined the van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences as an assistant research professor. She is a guest researcher at the Leiden Observatory. Dr. Candian is interested in astrochemistry and the main focus of her research is to understand the lifecycle of large carbonaceous molecules in the Universe using a multidisciplinary approach, involving quantum chemistry calculations, modelling, experiments and astronomical observations.
group page: https://alessandracandian.wixsite.com/alessandra
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Leiden Observatory
Rebecka Lindblad
Dr. Rebecka Lindblad received a PhD in physics from the X-ray Photon Science division at Uppsala University in 2014. In 2015 she joined the group of Tobias Lau at BESSY II in Berlin as a postdoc, after which she spent one year at Lund University at the division of Synchrotron Radiation Physics in the group of Stacey Sörensen. This work focused on NEXAFS of small cluster ions, or molecular ions stored in an ion trap. At 2018 she returned to Uppsala University for a second postdoc, this time in the Inorganic Chemistry research programme. As of 2021 she holds a position as a researched in this group, which is combined with part-time work in the LDM group at MAX IV in Lund. Her research focus is synchrotron radiation based electron spectroscopies for materials characterisation.
group page: https://kemi.uu.se/angstrom/research/inorganic-chemistry
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Uppsala University
Mizuho Fushitani
Dr. Mizuho Fushitani received a PhD in chemistry from Kyoto University, Japan, in 2002, and joined as a postdoctoral researcher in a group of Prof. Nikolaus Schwentner at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. In 2006, he was appointed as a staff member in Prof. Akiyoshi Hishikawa's group at Institute for Molecular Science(IMS), Japan. From 2010, he moved to Nagoya University and is currently an associate professor of the department of chemistry. His research interests include reaction imaging and control of ultrafast dynamics of molecules by using laser high-order harmonics, and nonlinear processes of atoms and molecules induced by intense EUV/X-ray FEL fields.
group page: https://www.chem.nagoya-u.ac.jp/en/
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Nagoya University
Taran Driver
Taran received his PhD from the Blackett Laboratory Laser Consortium at Imperial College London and holds a BSc from the University of Nottingham in Physics & Philosophy (Jt. Hons.). His primary doctoral research project was the development of a new type of mass spectrometry for the structural analysis of protein, DNA and RNA molecules, named two-dimensional partial-covariance mass spectrometry (2D-PC-MS). His current interests are centered on the study of ultrafast coherent electron motion in molecules, for which the natural timescale is in the attosecond regime. In his present position at the Stanford PULSE Institute/Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), his work focuses on the development of novel analysis techniques for x-ray free-electron laser measurements and the real-time observation of attosecond electron dynamics, making use of the unique soft x-ray attosecond capabilities of the LCLS.
group page: https://ultrafast.stanford.edu/ato-attosecond-science
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LCLS, Stanford
Andrew J. Howard
Andrew J. Howard received his B.S. in Optics from the University of Rochester in 2019. During his time at Rochester, he served as a Research Assistant in the ultrafast group at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. He was awarded the Charles L. Newton Prize for his work. In late 2019, Howard enrolled in the Applied Physics Ph.D. program at Stanford University and was named the Albion Walter Hewlett Fellow. Here he studies experimental strong-field physics and ultrafast laser-driven molecular dynamics. He currently specializes in 3D fragment-momentum imaging, in which the three-dimensional momentum of molecular fragments produced during the interaction between a laser and a molecule yields valuable information about femtosecond molecular processes and light-matter interactions.
personal page: https://profiles.stanford.edu/andrew-howard
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Stanford University