Plenary and Keynote Speakers

Prof. Carole Perry
Nottingham Trent University, UK
Plenary Speaker

Carole Perry obtained her undergraduate and DPhil research degrees in chemistry from the University of Oxford, UK where she also held an independent junior research fellowship. She has held permanent academic positions at Brunel University and Nottingham Trent University where she is currently a distinguished research professor. She has held fellowships/ visiting professorships in Israel (Weizmann Institute), France (Université Pierre et Marie Curie), Germany (KIT) and USA (Suny, Buffalo and Radcliffe Institute, Harvard). Her research interests lie at the interface between biology, chemistry and physics.

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Prof. Federico Rosei
University of Trieste, Italy
Plenary Speaker

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Prof. Ian White
University of Bath, UK
Plenary Speaker

Ian White was educated at the Belfast Royal Academy and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he gained his BA and PhD degrees in 1980 and 1984.[6] He was then appointed a research fellow and assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge before becoming professor of physics at the University of Bath in 1990. In 1996 he moved to the University of Bristol and became head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 1998, before returning to the University of Cambridge in October 2001.

While in Cambridge he served in the roles of master of Jesus College, head of the School of Technology, and pro-vice-chancellor for institutional affairs. He was a key member of the UK-China Global Issues Dialogue Centre at Cambridge, which was funded by Huawei and active in the 2010s. Critics attributed White’s involvement with the centre as a contributing factor to Cambridge’s silence over the Chinese government’s increasing encroachment on academic freedom in the late 2010s.[7][8]

In 2018, White retired from the mastership of Jesus College to become vice-chancellor of the University of Bath. He accepted a salary that was about half of his predecessor’s, a move praised by student and staff unions as a positive development in tackling excessive pay gaps in academia.[9]

Topic of the talk: Trends in Quantum Networking using Continuous Variable Modulation Techniques
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Prof. Igor Aharonivich
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Keynote Speaker

Professor Igor Aharonovich received his PhD in 2010 from the University of Melbourne and spent two years in Harvard as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof Evelyn Hu. In 2013 Igor returned to Australia and joined the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) where is currently a full Professor and the UTS node director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems.
Igor’s group is focusing on exploring single emitters in wide band gap semiconductors, such as diamond and more recently hexagonal boron nitride. His group is also interested in innovative approaches for nanofabrication of nanophotonics devices for quantum circuitry. But most importantly – Igor’s group has members from 11 different countries which forms a vibrant and a dynamic environment.
Igor received numerous international awards and recognitions including the 2017 Pawsey medal from the Australian Academy of Science, 2019 CN Yang Award – honors young researchers with prominent research achievements in physics in the Asia Pacific region and the 2020 Kavli foundation early career lectureship in materials science. He was also elected as a fellow of OPTICA (class 2021) and SPIE (2023).

Topic of the talk: Hexagonal Boron Nitride - An Intriguing Platform For On Chip Quantum Technologies
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Prof. Mohsen Rahmani
Nottingham Trent University, UK
Keynote Speaker

Mohsen Rahmani is a professor of optics and photonics and the leader of the advanced optics and Photonics laboratory at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), in the UK. He obtained his PhD from the National University of Singapore in 2013, followed by a postdoc fellowship at Imperial College London and the Australian Research Council Early Career Fellowship at the Australian National University. In 2020, he joined NTU via the prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship. Shortly after moving to the UK, he was also awarded the UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship. Recently, he has secured an ERC Consolidator Grant. His research activities span over light-matter interactions with nanometre-scale particles for applications in flat optics, near-infrared imaging, bio-sensing, and reconfigurable optics. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards and prizes, including the Australian Eureka Prize (Australian Oscar of Science), the Early Career Medal from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and the Australian Optical Society Geoff Opat Award. Professor Rahmani has delivered 40+ invited talks, seminars and keynotes at international conferences and has published more than 80 peer-reviewed journal papers (H-index=43). He is the past chair of the IEEE Nanotechnology Chapter across the UK and Ireland section and a distinguished lecturer for IEEE Nanotechnology Council 2024.

Topic of the talk: Engineered Nanoscale Particles: Building Blocks of Tomorrow’s Optical Technologies
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Dr. Rachel Won
Nature Photonics, UK
Keynote Speaker

Rachel Won is an International Editor of Nature Photonics. She joined the journal in June 2006 as one of the four Founding Editors. Before that, Rachel worked for Aston University’s Business Partnership Unit in Birmingham, UK, as a Medici Fellow, commercializing the research output of the university, particularly that of photonics research. She obtained her PhD in microwave photonics and nonlinear optics as a member of Aston’s Photonics Research Group. She worked for Philips Optical Storage in Singapore as an Optics Engineer after completing her Master’s degree study in Nanyang Technological University of Singapore doing research in optical fibre sensing. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the National University of Malaysia. She is a Fellow of OPTICA and SPIE (the International Society of Optics and Photonics).

Topic of the talk: Publishing in Nature Journals
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Assoc. Prof. Ziyuan Li-Beijing
Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), China
Invited Speaker

Dr. Ziyuan Li is currently the associate professor at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT). She received her bachelor’s degree from BIT in 2009 and PhD degree from the University of New South Wales in 2013. She joined The Australian National University in 2014 and received the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award in 2018. She then joined BIT in 2022. Her research interests are in III-V semiconductor optoelectronic devices such as photodetectors, solar cells and light-emitting diodes. She has published over 60 SCI journal papers, 2 book chapters, 4 patents, and delivered invited talks at several international conferences.

Topic of the talk: III-V Semiconductor Based Nanostructures for High Performance Infrared Photodetection

Dr. Rocio Camacho Morales
The Australian National University, Australia
Invited Speaker

Dr. Rocio Camacho Morales is a postdoctoral fellow at The Australian National University (ANU), where
her research spans several branches of optics, including nanophotonics, optical metasurfaces, and nonlinear frequency generation. She is actively engaged in industry collaborations and research projects focused on infrared up-conversion imaging using nonlinear metasurfaces.
Dr. Rocio has authored and co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals, including Advanced Materials, Advanced Photonics, and Light: Science & Applications. She has also contributed to other publications, including newsletters and a recently published book chapter titled
Nonlinear Phenomena Empowered by Resonant Dielectric Nanostructures (Elsevier, 2024). She has disseminated her research across various media outlets and was honoured with the Warsash Science Communication Prize in Optics in 2022.
Dr. Rocio received her Bachelor of Science in Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, her Master of Science from the Ensenada Centre for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Mexico, and her PhD in Physics from the ANU.

Topic of the talk: Nanophotonics for lightweight night vision devices

Assoc. Prof. Rui Zhou
Xiamen University, China
Invited Speaker

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