Federico Capasso elected into the Academia Europaea

Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, has been elected into the prestigious Academia Europaea, an organization of prominent scholars.

The Academia Europaea, founded in 1988, includes more than 3,000 members from across the humanities and sciences, including 52 Nobel Prize recipients. Members are drawn from across the whole European continent and include European scholars who live outside of Europe.  Members are nominated and elected based on their “sustained academic excellence and  distinguished intellectual contributions.”

“It’s exciting to join an organization with such a broad scope and mission covering all fields of inquiry from science and engineering to the humanities and the liberal arts,” said Capasso.  

Capasso, who was born and raised in Rome, is world renown for his pioneering work in nanoscale science and technology ranging from the invention of quantum cascade lasers to flat optics based on metasurfaces, which is revolutionizing the design of lenses  . His research has encompassed a broad range of topics including band-structure engineering of semiconductor nanostructures,  quantum devices, the discovery of repulsive Casimir forces and plasmonics,

Capasso is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His awards include the IEEE Sarnoff Award in Electronics (1991), the Materials Research Society Medal (1995), the Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute (1997), the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics (1998), the Optical Society Wood Prize (2001), the IEEE Edison Medal (2004), the APS Arthur Schawlow Prize in Laser Science (2004), the King Faisal Prize (2005), the Berthold Leibinger Zukunft Prize (2010), the Julius Springer Prize in Applied Physics (2010), the Jan Czochralski Award for lifetime achievements in Materials Science (2011), the European Physical Society's Prize for Applied Aspects of Quantum Electronics and Optics (2013), and the SPIE Gold Medal (2013).