Giulio Nicola Cerullo
Full Professor, Group Leader
Giulio Cerullo is a Full Professor with the Physics Department, Politecnico di Milano, where he leads the Ultrafast Optical Spectroscopy laboratory.
Prof. Cerullo’s research activity covers a broad area known as “Ultrafast Optical Science”, and concerns on the one hand pushing our capabilities to generate and manipulate ultrashort light pulses, and on the other hand using such pulses to capture the dynamics of ultrafast events in molecules, nanostructures and two-dimensional materials (graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides).
Additional research topics are the applications of ultrafast lasers to coherent Raman microscopy and micro/nanostructuring.
He has published more than 450 papers which have received more than 20000 citations (H-index: 74, Scopus). He is a Fellow of the Optical Society and of the European Physical Society and Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division of the European Physical Society. He is the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant (2012-2017) on two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy of biomolecules. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the journals Optica, Laser&Photonics Reviews, Scientific Reports, Chemical Physics, Journal of Raman spectroscopy.
He is General Chair of the conferences CLEO/Europe 2017, Ultrafast Phenomena 2018 and the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy 2020.
Cristian Manzoni
Senior Researcher @ IFN, CNR
Dr. Cristian Manzoni is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the Italian National Research Council (IFN-CNR). In 2009-2010 he was visiting scientist at the Max Planck research group for structural dynamics (CFEL, Desy, Hamburg). In 2011-2017 he was a contract professor of Physics at Politecnico di Milano.
His research activity focuses on the development of ultrabroadband parametric amplifiers for the generation of few-cycle light pulses in the ultraviolet, visible and infrared spectral range. The research also involves the characterization of light pulses and their manipulation, for applications in time-resolved spectroscopy of organic and inorganic systems, and for the study of femtochemical reactions. Spectroscopic characterizations involve Pump-probe, 2D spectroscopy and Raman-induced processes at femtosecond time-scales. Recently, he focused on Fourier-transform hyperspectral imaging and microscopy in the visible and infrared spectral range, and on their coupling to ultrafast science, for applications in remote and environmental sensing, conservation science, security and medical imaging.
Stefano Dal Conte
Associate Professor @ Polimi
Master thesis in Physics (University of Pavia -2007), PhD in Physics (University of Pavia and Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Brescia – 2011) under the supervision of Prof. Fulvio Parmigiani. After the PhD, he spent a period abroad as a PostDoc at the Technical University of Eindohven. He moved to Politecnico di Milano in 2012, where he is currently holding the position of Associate Professor. His reasearch activity focuses on the study of ultrafast processes in 2D materials, nanostructured systems and strongly correlated materials.
Margherita Maiuri
Associate Professor @ Polimi
Born in Naples, she studied Physics Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and she received her master cum laude in 2010 and her PhD in Physics cum laude with a thesis on “Ultrafast Energy and Electron Transfer Processes in Natural and Artificial Light Harvesting Systems”. Her doctorate studies on renewable energies have been recognized by the prestigious ENI Award – Debut in Science. In 2014 she moved to the States for her postodctoral studies at Princeton University and in 2015 she was recipient of the Marie Curie Global Fellowship “PHOEBUS”. In 2018 she received the “L’Oreàl-UNESCO for Women in Science” Fellowship award. Since 2020 she is Assistant Professor at the Physics Dept.
Her main research interests deal with the application of multidimensional coherent spectroscopies (transient absorption, 2D spectroscopy) to the study of complex exciton systems for energy capture and manipulation (organic systems, biomolecules, photosynthetic proteins, materials for OPVs and optoelectronics, plasmonics).
Christoph Gadermaier
Associate Professor @ Polimi
christoph.gadermaier@polimi.it
Christoph is a tenured Associate Professor for the Physics of Matter at the Politecnico di Milano and affiliated researcher at the Center for Nanoscience and Technology of the Italian Institute of Technology. He obtained his PhD in 2002 at Graz University of Technology in his native Austria. From 2004 to 2006 he was a post-doc at the Politecnico di Milano, after which he moved to the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2018 he received tenure at the Politecnico. His research interest focuses on the electron dynamics in solids, especially on the processes that occur on the fs and ps time scale. Over the course of his career, he has investigated a wide range of materials, most notably conjugated polymers and oligomers, carbon nanotubes, inorganic nanowires, and high-temperature superconductors. His current interest centers on two-dimensional layered semiconductors and their nanotubes.
Tersilla Virgili
Senior Researcher @ IFN, CNR
Tersilla Virgili graduated in Physics in 1996 at the University of Bologna. She got her PhD in Physics in 2000 from the University of Sheffield (UK). Since 2001 she is researcher at the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the National Research Council (CNR). Her scientific activity is represented by more than 90 publications international, 2 international patents and 4 contributions in international books. Her scientific interest is mainly based on two areas: 1) ultrafast spectroscopy of organic material, hybrid and inorganic for photonic and photovoltaic devices; 2) photophysics of organic microcavities working in weak and strong coupling regime and quantum batteries.
Franco Valduga de Almeida Camargo
Researcher @ IFN, CNR
franco.valdugadealmeida@polimi.it
Franco was born in southern Brazil and studied Physics in Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre). He got his PhD in Physical Chemistry in the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) with professor Stephen R. Meech for studying coherence signatures in two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy, as well as the conversion of light into mechanical energy in molecular motors.
Since 2020 he is researcher at IFN-CNR.
His current research interests are in developing and applying ultrafast spectroscopy techniques to understand how different systems convert light into useful processes, such as generating electricity in organic photovoltaics, photo-catalysis and photosynthesis.
Chiara Trovatello
Marie Curie Global Fellow @ColumbiaUniversity
Assistant Professor @Polimi
Ambassador @Optica
From March 2023, CT is Assistant Professor at Polimi and Adjunct Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University (New York, NY, USA) where she is conducting her independent research as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow (PIONEER). Prior to join Columbia University, C.T. got a PhD in Physics under the supervision of Prof. Cerullo and Prof. Dal Conte. During the PhD, CT visited the University of Wurzburg and she was granted a Marie Curie RISE Fellowship to visit Columbia University. Her research activity focuses on nonlinear optics and spectroscopy of layered materials, like Transition Metal Dichalcogenides.
CT is recipient of the 2022 Bernard J. Couillaud Prize. Founder and Former President of the Optica Student Chapter of Milan. Funder and member of the EPS Young Minds section of Milan.
More info.
Armando Genco
Assistant Professor@ Polimi
Dr. Armando Genco has a proven expertise in the fields of strong light-matter interactions and 2D materials. Starting from his PhD carried out in the Nanotechnology Laboratory of Lecce (Italy), he intensively studied light-matter interactions in different microcavity systems based on organic, hybrid and inorganic semiconductors, covering all the aspects of the research, such as the theoretical simulation, fabrication and optical characterization of the devices. His knowledge and skills have been broadened even more during a 3-years postdoc at the University of Sheffield (UK) in the group of Prof. A. Tartakovskii, where he performed advanced spectroscopy on 2D materials and van der Waals heterostructures in one of the world-leading groups in this field.
He recently moved to Politecnico di Milano (ITALY) in the group of Prof. Giulio Cerullo, to study the ultrafast optical response of 2D materials and microcavities.
He was recipient of the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship ENOSIS about the strong interactions of light with atomically thin materials at ultrafast time scales.
From June 2023 he became Assistant Professor.
Charles Sayers
PostDoc @ Polimi
Charles received his PhD in Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Bath in 2020 under the supervision of Dr. Enrico Da Como. His thesis, entitled “Charge density wave phenomena in trigonal transition metal dichalcogenides”, focusses on understanding the origin of phase transitions in strongly-correlated TMDs. For this work, he used a combination of optical and photoemission spectroscopy techniques to study their electronic structure. During his PhD, Charles was visiting researcher in the UPhoS group at Polimi (Dec 2018 – Feb 2019).
He is currently postdoctoral fellow under supervision of Prof. Giulio Cerullo, and is utilizing ultrafast optical spectroscopy to investigate the dynamics of 2D materials and their heterostructures.
Mattia Russo
PostDoc @ Polimi
Mattia Russo was born in Mariano Comense (Italy) in 1993.
He graduated in Engineering Physics and he is now a PhD candidate in Physics at Politecnico di Milano.
Research Topic: Application of Two-Dimensional Electronic Spectroscopy technique to capture the dynamics of ultrafast processes in photosynthetic complexes and 2D semiconductors.
Mattia is also member of the Optical Society of America and member of the Optica Student Chapter of Milan.
Federico Visentin
PhD Student @ Polimi
Federico was born in Varese in 1997. He got his Master’s degree in Engineering Physics at Polimi with a thesis on the study of ultrafast carrier diffusion in perovskites with widefield transient holographic microscopy. He is currently doing is PhD under the supervision of Dr. Franco V. A. Camargo, focusing on the development and applications of ultrafast transient holographic microscopy.
He is also member of the Optica student chapter of Milan.
Martin Hoermann
PhD Student @ Polimi
Martin conducted his Bachelor and Master studies in physics at the University of Constance, where he graduated with the master thesis entitled “Plasmonic Nanoresonators in Attosecond Electron Microscopy”. From November 2020, he is a member of the MUSIQ project and applies in his reasearch 2DES on artificial light-harvesting systems.
Lorenzo Uboldi
PhD Student @ Polimi
Lorenzo studied Particle Physics at University of Milano. After his master’s he worked for more than a year as a fellow at CERN, where he mainly applied deep learning techniques to neutrino detectors. After this experience, he decided to completely change his field of research and joined the ultrafast spectroscopy group at Politecnico to start a PhD.
Cristina Cruciano
PhD Student @ Polimi
Cristina got her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Physics from Università di Pisa. Her master thesis work titled “Development of a Hyperspectral K-Space Microscope for the Characterization of Optical Microcavities” was performed in the group of professor Giulio Cerullo at Politecnico di Milano, under the supervision of Dr. Cristian Manzoni. Afterward, she joined the ultrafast spectroscopy group at Polimi to start her Ph.D. studies within the field of ultrafast spectroscopy of 2D material. Cristina is currently working under the supervision of Prof. Stefano Dal Conte. Her research focuses on strongly coupled systems, such as microcavities and metasurfaces.
Alessandro Baserga
PhD Student @ Polimi
Alessandro was born in Como in 1998. He got his bachelor’s and master’s degree in Engineering Physics at Politecnico di Milano. His master thesis work titled “Femtosecond nonlinear coherent coupling of magnons in an antiferromagnet” was performed in the group of professor Alfred Leitenstorfer at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Afterward, he joined the ultrafast spectroscopy group at Polimi to start his Ph.D. studies.
Francesco Gucci
PhD Student @ Polimi
Micol Bartolotti
PhD Student @ Polimi
Matteo Ghezzi
PhD Student @ Polimi
Previously at Cerullo Lab
Andrea Villa
Born and raised near Milan, Andrea is currently doing his PhD in Physics under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Scotognella. His research activity is currently focused on assessing the mechanism of hot electron extraction in doped semiconductor nanocrystals (DSNC)/semiconductor junctions by means of ultrafast pump-probe and two-photon absorption experiments in the near and mid-infrared.
Michele Guizzardi
Born in 1992 in Vezza d’Oglio, Michele Guizzardi is a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Scotognella and Prof. Giulio Cerullo. He obtained his master degree at Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on the Ultrafast properties of the graphene-HBN heterostructure. His PhD research activities focus on the study of the ultrafast and nonlinear optical properties of heavily doped nanocrystal (ITO) and their coupling with 2D semiconductors.
After the PhD, he joined City University of New York (CUNY) as a postdoc.
Francesco Scotognella
Francesco Scotognella was associate professor in Physics at Politecnico di Milano, since 2018. Since 2012 he is affiliated to the Center of Nanoscience and Technology (Italian Institute of Technology). He studied at Università di Parma and Università di Milano-Bicocca, where he got the PhD in Materials Science in 2009. In 2008 he has been visiting scientist at University of Toronto, in 2013 visiting professor at NTU Singapore and in 2016-2018 visiting scientist at Berkeley Labs. He has been post doc in the EU Project Photo-FET (FP7-ICT-248052) at Politecnico di Milano. From 2011 to 2018 he has been tenured Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Milano. He is studying the photophysics of nanostructures. He is coordinator of SONAR, EU MSCA RISE project, and principal investigator of PAIDEIA, ERC 2018 Consolidator Grant.
Floriana Morabito
Floriana got both M.S. and B.S. in Engineering Physics at Politecnico di Milano. Master thesis on “Ultrafast photoinduced processes in plasmonic structures coupled to MoS2 nanosheets” under the supervision of Prof. Margherita Zavelani-Rossi. Currently, she is a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Christoph Gadermaier. She works on ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy at Prof. Giulio Cerullo’s ultrafast labs, aiming to the study of exciton and relaxation dynamics in 2D semiconducting materials (i.e. transition metal dichalcogenide few-layers and heterostructures, Germanane (GeCH3), black phosphorus (BP) and M-Xenes (Ti3C2) from liquid-phase exfoliation. She received a training on this scalable technique during her research stay at Trinity College Dublin joining Prof. Valeria Nicolosi’s group.
After the PhS, she joined AREA Science Park in Trieste as a postdoc.
Giacomo Sansone
Giacomo was born in Parma in 1997. He studied Physics at the University of Parma, receiving his bachelor’s degree cum laude in 2019 with a thesis on the “Magnetic and Structural Characterization of NiMnSn Heusler Compounds” under the supervision of Prof. Massimo Solzi.
At the end of January 2020, after winning an Erasmus SMT fellowship, he joined the Group of UltraFast Optical Spectroscopy (GUFOS) at the Friedrich – Schiller Universitӓt Jena, led by Prof. Giancarlo Soavi. Giacomo started his master’s degree studies in Physics at the University of Parma in October 2020 and he joined the Ultrafast Spectroscopy Group led by Prof. Giulio Cerullo in May 2022 for his master’s thesis work. His research project, supervised by Prof. G. Cerullo, Prof. S. Dal Conte and Dr. A. Genco, focuses on the ultrafast optical response of 2D materials and their strong interaction with light when confined in microcavities.
Soumen Ghosh
Originally from the village Kamra in the state of West Bengal, India, Soumen is broadly interested in the ultrafast dynamics of (bio)-molecular and materials systems. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Michigan State University, USA in 2017. There he worked under the supervision of Professor Warren Beck on the ultrafast dynamics of photosynthetic light-harvesting using heterodyne transient grating and 2D-electronic spectroscopy.
Currently as Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Soumen is working on the development of a broadband femtosecond circular dichroism spectrometer to study photoinduced chiroptical dynamics in (bio)-molecules and materials.
Luca Moretti
Luca studied Physics Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and received his master cum laude in October 2013. He obtained his PhD in Physics in the same university in March 2017, with a thesis on “Ultrafast Charachterization of Hybrid Nanocomposutes for Energy Production and Optical Switching”. During his research activity he visited the group of Prof P. J. Schuck at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (November 2015-June 2016) and the group of Prof. G. Scholes at Princeton University (April-November 2017).
His research activity is focused on the ultrafast optical properties of organic molecules and plasmonic materials.
Veronica Rose Policht
Ph.D in Applied Physics (University of Michigan). M.S. in Electrical Engineering (University of Michigan). B.S in Biophysics (Loyola University in Chicago).
Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, IL. Her doctoral thesis applied ultrafast multidimensional electronic spectroscopy to photosynthetic protein complexes and their constituent molecules under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Ogilvie. Currently applying ultrafast pump-probe and two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy to the study of exciton and spin dynamics in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers and heterostructures.
Aaron Micheal Ross
Aaron received his PhD in Physics from the University of Michigan in 2019, entitled “Optical Spectroscopy of Dynamic Nuclear Spin Polarization in Single InAs Quantum Dots”.
He is a postdoctoral fellow under supervision of Prof. Francesco Scotognella utilizing ultrafast nonlinear optical spectroscopy to study plasmonics in novel materials including doped semiconductor nanoparticles, two-dimensional semiconductors, and functionalized graphene, with the goal of utilizing hot electron extraction for enhanced solar energy harvesting in the infrared.
Piotr Jan Kabacinski
Piotr is from Poland, where in the Institute of Physical Chemistry he was working on ultrashort pulse characterization and building high power femtosecond fiber lasers. His PhD project is the development of ultrafast UV spectroscopy techniques and characterization of primary photoinduced processes in DNA, amino acids and proteins in the framework of LightDyNAmics European Training Network.
Lucia Ganzer
Lucia Ganzer studied Physics at University of Milano-Bicocca where she graduated with a thesis in Biophotonics. After graduation, she worked for almost a year at San Raffaele Research Institute in Milano. In 2015 she moved to Politecnico of Milano for a PhD in Physics. From 2019 she has a research fellowship at CNR.
Andrea Camellini
He graduated in Engineering Physics at Politecnico di Milano in 2014 and obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the same institution in 2018 with a thesis on ultrafast spectroscopy of low-dimensional materials. Currently a postdoctoral resercher, his research activity focuses on ultrafast spectroscopy of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals, plasmonic nanostructures, two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides and hybrid metal/semiconductor systems.
Amedeo Carbone
Born and raised in the small town of Lapio (AV), Amedeo got his Bachelor degree in Engineering Physics from Polimi, and he is currently working on his Master Thesis under the supervision of Prof. Stefano Dal Conte and Prof. Giulio Cerullo. His research focuses on ultrafast micro-spectroscopy applied to 2D Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TMDs).
Amedeo is also the vice – president of the student association Terna Sinistrorsa.
Chiara Ceconello
Elena Corbetta
Elena was born in Milano in 1996. She got her bachelor degree in Engineering Physics at Polimi, she’s currently a master student in the Nanophysics and Nanotechnologies track and she’s doing her Master Thesis within the PAIDEIA ERC project for infrared photovaltaic devices under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Scotognella, focusing on ultrafast spectroscopy.