Team Leaders
Shane Eaton (IFN)
Shane Eaton received a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia in 2002, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2008. During his Ph.D., he studied the effect of repetition rate on thermal diffusion and heat accumulation during femtosecond laser writing of optical waveguides in glasses for applications in telecommunications and sensing. His main research interest is femtosecond laser writing of 3D photonic circuits in diamond for bio-sensing and quantum information. He currently the PI of the LasIonDef Marie Curie ITN involving 13 ESRs. He has over 70 publications, 100 conference contributions and an h-index of 31.
Paolo Olivero (UNITO)
Paolo Olivero was awarded a Ph.D. in Physics in 2004 from the University of Torino, Italy. From 2004 to 2008 he held several post-doctoral and visiting scientist fellowships at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and at the Ruđer Bošković Institute (Zagreb, Croatia), working on the use of ion beams for the microfabrication and quantum optical functionalization of diamond. Since 2018, he is Associate Professor at the Physics Department of the University of Torino, where he coordinates a research program on diamond science and technology for applications in quantum optics and biosensing.
Anthony Bennett (CU)
Anthony Bennett grew up in the English seaside town of Bognor Regis, which is famous for the damning verdict King George V gave it on his deathbed. He then went to university in Cambridge for 4 years of punting, before joining Imperial College London for a dark period. His saving was a job at Toshiba Research Europe Limited, where he worked for a very long time, being promoted to Team Leader in 2014. He moved to Cardiff University in 2017 as Reader in the School of Engineering. He is affiliated to the School of Physics and Astronomy and works closely with the Institute for Compound Semiconductors cleanroom. His research group is supported by the UK National Hub in Quantum Computing and Simulation, a 5-year EPSRC Fellowship and the Welsh Government’s Sêr Cymru programme. He has filed some patents, written lots of papers and likes going to conferences.
Working with Dr. John Hadden, Yanzhao Guo and Bilge Yagci we will investigate the formation, optical properties and control of colour centers in a variety of wide bandgap semiconductors in LasIonDef. Our dearest hope is that this will lead to new and exciting science, whilst building strong collaborations with the LasIonDef partners.
Alexander Kubanek (UULM)
Alexander Kubanek, born May 13, 1980 (Nuremberg, Germany) is a full professor at Ulm. His research expertise includes quantum optics, quantum networks, single photon nonlinear optics, quantum technology, nanotechnology, hybrid quantum systems and cavity quantum electrodynamics with single photon emitters (SPE) such as color centers in diamond, SPE in 2D materials, quantum dots and neutral atoms. He graduated in nanotechnology at U. Würzburg in 2006 on quantum dots strongly coupled to semiconductor microcavities with a 1-year stay at UBC. He worked on neutral Rubidium atoms strongly coupled to the mode of a high-Finesse optical resonator at the Max-Plank Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and spent a theoretical research stay at the University of Auckland. During that time (2006-2010) he was fellow of Bavarian Network of Excellence and International PhD Programme Quantum Computing, Communication and Control. After his PhD he joined Harvard U. as a postdoctoral fellow and received an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship. He stayed in Harvard as a research associate until 2014 before being appointed full professor with a Carl Zeiss professorship at Ulm.
Pawel Machnikowski (WUST)
Paweł Machnikowski received his PhD in theoretical physics from Wrocław University of Science and Technology in 1999. In 2002/2003 he spent one year with Tilmann Kuhn in Münster as a post-doc, working on carrier dynamics and phonon-induced decoherence in optically controlled semiconductor quantum dots. He is currently a professor and a leader of a research group at the Department of Theoretical Physics, Wrocław University of Science and Technology. His research interests include properties of semiconductor nanostructures and solid state quantum optics.
Alessandro Greborio (LITH)
Dr. Alessandro Greborio is CEO of Lithium Lasers, received his PhD title in Electronic Engineering with a thesis titled: “High energy femtosecond lasers”. Before founding Lithium Lasers he worked as laser scientist in the R&D department of Spectra Physics (Austria) and NKT Photonics (Switzerland). His areas of expertise are entrepreneurship, laser science and ultrafast pulse synthesis.
Alex McMillan (ELVESYS)
Dr. Alexander McMillan: R&D Manager in the Elvesys Innovation Unit. He received his MEng degree in Mechanical & Electrical Engineering from the University of Edinburgh (UK) before conducting his PhD in industry between Elvesys and KU Leuven (Belgium), focusing on novel thermoplastics for microfluidic applications in chemistry and biology. His areas of expertise are mechanical & electrical design and testing, microfluidics, and materials characterization.
Astghik Chalyan (EYEST)
Astghik Chalyan has obtained her BSc in Physics from the Yerevan State University in 2013 and an MSc in Electronics and Nanoelectronics from the Russian-Armenian (Slavonic) University in 2015, Armenia. During her master's degree, she has worked on the theory of electronic and optical properties of quantum dots. She has pursued an ERASMUS internship in the NanoScience Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy where her research has been devoted to the study of nonlinearity in strained silicon and an optical network-on-chip in the EU project “IRIS”. She also has worked as a LabVIEW software engineer in Armenia. From 2018-2021 she has conducted her PhD research on the development of the miniaturised tuneable light source for spectroscopic applications as an ESR within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN – EID xCLASS project between industrial partner Anteryon BV(NL) and B-PHOT Brussels Photonics at Vrije Universiteit Brussel(BE). She is an active member of SPIE and OPTICA (formerly OSA). Since August 2021 she works at the STEM and outreach department in B-PHOT.
Egle Molotokaite (IFN)
Egle Molotokaite is the project manager of LasIonDef. She has previous experience managing the ITN project SMART-X, which stands for Study of carrier transport in Materials by time-Resolved specTroscopy with ultrashort soft X-ray light. She has been working in the ultrafast field since 2009, when she arrived in Politecnico di Milano, where she got her Ph.D. followed by the post-doc positions in CNR (National Research Council) and IIT (Italian Institute of Technology). Lately, she has joined the photonics and nanotechnology department of CNR, where she is responsible for the successful project’s implementation and realization. Her expertise in laser physics and ultrafast optics allows her to speak the same language with researchers, while her personal skills help her projects run smoothly.