Keynote Speakers

Dr. Jifeng Liu
Dartmouth University, USA
Plenary Speaker

Dr. Jifeng Liu is currently an Associate Professor at Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College. He received his B.S. and M. S. degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and his Ph.D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His major research field is nanophotonic materials and devices, including integrated photonics for ultralow energy photonic datalinks as well as nanomaterials and nanostructures for novel photodetectors, solar photovoltaics and solar thermal energy harvesting. He has authored or co-authored more than 80 peer-reviewed journal papers, more than 70 conferences papers, and 6 book chapters, which have been cited ~10,000 times according to Google Scholar. Dr. Liu has also been granted 14 U.S. patents related to nanophotonic materials and devices. He received National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2013, and was elected a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2015.

Topic of Keynote: Nanophotonics: There’s Plenty of Room to “Light up” the Bottom
Keynote Abstract

Dr. Jonathan Baugh
University of Waterloo, Canada
Keynote Speaker

Jonathan Baugh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. His research group investigates the potential of semiconductor nanoelectronics for scalable quantum information applications. Dr. Baugh obtained a PhD in Physics in 2001 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and did seminal work on nuclear magnetism in quantum dots during postdoctoral studies at the University of Tokyo. He has published more than 60 research papers across many subfields, including magnetic resonance, quantum control, quantum transport, quantum dots, nanowires, proximity superconductivity, nanomechanics and materials science. Recently, he has engaged the engineering community by giving invited tutorials on emerging quantum technologies at several international semiconductor/microelectronics conferences.

Topic of Keynote: Semiconductor nano-electronics for quantum information and sensing
Keynote Abstract

Dr. Simone Pisana
York University, Canada
Keynote Speaker

Simone Pisana received his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2008. His graduate studies focused on electronic properties of novel nanostructured materials such as carbon nanotubes, semiconducting nanowires, and graphene. He then joined Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (now Western Digital) as a Postdoctoral Researcher and continued on to become Research Staff Member in 2010 and Senior Research Manager in 2014. While in industry, he worked on nanoscale magnetic field sensing devices and energy-assisted magnetic recording technologies. Dr. Pisana joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University in 2014 as Associate Professor, and is serving as Graduate Program Director since 2018. His research is aimed at exploring transport phenomena in nanoscale devices & materials for energy efficient nanoelectronic device engineering. He is Senior Member of the IEEE, and has authored over 40 refereed journal articles with over 8,000 citations and 12 US patents & applications.

Topic of Keynote: Nanoscale heat transport at plasmonic interfaces and in 2D crystals
Keynote Abstract

Dr. Wilfred van der Wiel
University of Twente, Netherlands
Keynote Speaker

Topic of Keynote: Material Learning

Dr. Michael Hilke
McGill University, Canada
Keynote Speaker

Michael Hilke is currently a faculty member in the department of Physics at McGill University. After completing his doctorate at the University of Geneva on disordered systems, he joined the group of Daniel Tsui (Physics Nobel laureate in 1998) in Princeton in 1996 to work with on two dimensional electron systems, where he discovered the quantized Hall insulator. After joining McGill in 2001 he built-up the Quantum Nano Electronics Laboratory (QNEL), a low temperature laboratory and a facility for the fabrication, processing and simulations of quantum, nano and low dimensional materials as well as applications in the biomedical field. He was the director of INTRIQ (Center for Quantum Information in Quebec) for 3 years, director of CPM (Center for the physics of Materials) at McGill for 6 years, and director of RQMP (Advanced Materials Center in Quebec) for 2 years. He is also active in several research projects on physics education research using new smart online learning tools.

Topic of Keynote: Phonon coherence and phonon engineering in nanostructures and graphene isotope superlattices
Keynote Abstract