Affiliation: Department of Physics, Umeå University
Keywords: Photonics, Ultrafast Science, Condensed Matter Physics, Metamaterials, Materials Science, Nanotechnology.
Full profile:
Nicolò holds a tenure-track professorship and is the head of the ‘Ultrafast Nanophotonics and Advanced Functional Materials’ Group at the Department of Physics, Umeå University (Sweden) supported by the Swedish Research Council, the European Innovation Council, the Faculty of Science and Technology and the Kempe Foundations. He is also a visiting researcher and group leader at the Department of Physics and Materials Science, University of Luxembourg, leading a research team working on the FNR CORE Project ‘Ultrafast coherent hybridization of photons and spins in multi-functional magnetoplasmonic metamaterials’ and the European H2020 FET-Open Project ‘Ultrafast Raman Technologies for Protein Identification and Sequencing’. Author of more than 50 scientific papers in renowned international journals (including Physical Review Letters, Nature Communications, Advanced Optical Materials and Nano Letters) and co-author of an international patent on metamaterials for nanophotonic applications, with more than 100 contributions at international conferences, international symposia, and colloquia, some of them as invited speaker.
Nicolò studied Physics at the University of Ferrara in Italy and he earned his Ph.D. title in Physics of Nanostructures and Advanced Materials (grade: outstanding cum laude) from the University of the Basque Country and CIC nanoGUNE (Spain) in 2016, where he worked on the optical properties of nanostructured magnetic materials. In 2015, he received the “Piero Brovetto” Award from the Italian Physical Society for “his contributions in the fields of nanomagnetism and nanooptics and the study of the physical properties of magnetoplasmonic nanoantennas and their application in bio-sensing”. In 2014 he was Visiting Scientist at the Department of Applied Physics at Aalto School of Science (Espoo, Finland) and in 2015 he was Visiting Scientist at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg (Sweden).
From 2017 to 2018, he was Research Associate at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa (Italy), working on the development of plasmonic nanostructures for controlling fundamental light-matter interactions, such as absorption and scattering of light, at the nanoscale. Concurrently he contributed to the design and development of plasmonic nanostructures for single protein sequencing through fluorescence and energy transfer mechanisms enhancement, as well as for cell’s membrane and nucleus investigations through surface enhanced spectroscopy.
From 2019 to 2021, he was a Junior Group Leader At the University of Luxembourg, where he led a research line focusing on ultrafast phenomena in magnetoplasmonic nanostructures, and on developing an ultrafast magneto-optical pump-probe spectroscopy setup working in different configurations (e.g., Faraday effect, polar and longitudinal Kerr effect, etc) in a broad spectral range (from visible to mid infrared) and based on the use of few-optical cycle light pulses. In 2019 he was also Visiting Scientist in the Group of Prof. Alfred Leitenstorfer at Konstanz University.
In 2021, he was awarded a prestigious Starting Grant from the Swedish Research Council aiming at studying nonthermal charge and spin dynamics in magnetoplasmonic nanostructures with sub-10 fs time resolution, and a Horizon Europe EIC-Pathfinder Project aiming at studying molecular structure by using advanced computational tools and ultrafast spectroscopy techniques together with international partners from Germany, Italy, France, Luxembourg and Sweden. Until now, he was able to collect more than 2.5 M€ to fund his own research as Principal Investigator in Luxembourg and Sweden.
Nicolò has also experience in the publishing industry since he was Early Career Member of Nano Letters Editorial Board (a journal of the American Chemical Society) from 2018 to 2021. Currently, he is Associate Editor of the journal ‘Advanced Photonics Nexus’ (published by SPIE and Chinese Laser Press) and Young Editorial Board Member of the journal ‘Ultrafast Science’, a Science partner journal published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and distributed by the American Associations for Advances in Science.
Finally, Nicolò is a certified Research Integrity trainer in the framework of the European Project VIRT2UE, aiming to provide the knowledge and skills to conduct virtue-based ethical research and to foster reflection on scientific virtues in researchers, in line with the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.
Research interests:
Nicolò’s research span a broad range of fundamental and applied aspects of natural sciences, with a special focus on both the fundamental and applied aspects of light-matter interactions in advanced and multifunctional nano- and meta-materials for opto-electronics and information processing, photochemistry and biotechnology, by using frequency- and time-resolved (magneto-)optical spectroscopy, finite-element computational methods and bottom-up/top-down nanofabrication techniques (for a brief introduction on nano- and meta-materials, you can see his TEDx talk entitled Metamaterials matter: smart material of future)