The sustainability of light-based technologies and the materials science underlying them are no longer separate questions. Solar conversion, photocatalysis, radiative cooling, low-power environmental and biomedical sensing, and the optical hardware emerging at the heart of AI accelerators rest on the same families of thin films, semiconductors, and nanostructures: materials that must absorb, emit, and route photons with high efficiency under realistic operating conditions. Their performance is increasingly judged not by isolated figures of merit but by the energy invested in fabrication, the dissipation incurred in operation, and the difficulty of recovery at end of life. This symposium convenes the materials communities working at this intersection — chalcogenide and oxide thin films, halide perovskites, two-dimensional semiconductors, plasmonic nanostructures, and electro-optic oxides — under a shared sustainability lens. Topics include nanomaterials for plasmonic and photothermal energy conversion, radiative cooling for buildings and electronics, perovskite emitters and modulators, metasurfaces for solar harvesting, photonic and plasmonic sensing for environmental and biomedical monitoring, photonic computing for energy-efficient AI, AI-driven materials discovery, operando nanoscale spectroscopy, and circular processing of chalcogenide and perovskite stacks. The objective is a sustained conversation between communities whose materials, modelling tools, and fabrication routes are already converging.
- Plasmonic, photothermal, and hot-carrier energy conversion
- Radiative cooling and passive thermal management
- Phase-change and chalcogenide photonics
- Halide-perovskite emitters and modulators
- Metasurfaces for solar harvesting
- Photonic and plasmonic sensing for environmental and biomedical monitoring
- Photonic computing for energy-efficient AI
- Energy-aware quantum photonics
- AI-driven discovery and design of photonic materials
- Operando and in situ nanoscale spectroscopy
Angelos joined NTNU as an Associate Professor of Optical Engineering and Nanophotonics in 2023. Prior to that he did his undergraduate and master degrees at the Department of Materials Science and Technology, University of Crete and obtained his PhD at the Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton. Then he was Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge and Researcher at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology.
His research focus on nanoscale quantum spectroscopies, plasmonics and metasurfaces. He is leading national and international activities in photonics with applications in quantum sensing and health monitoring.
Angelos serves as an Editorial Board Member of npj Nanophotonics part of Nature Portfolio and Associate Editor and Early Career Editorial Advisory Board of APL Photonics.
Manuel BärtschiErik GarnettMagnus Jonsson is a Professor of Applied Physics at Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden, where he leads the Organic Photonics and Nanooptics group at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics (LOE). His research focuses on novel photonics and nano-optics, for applications in sensors, smart materials, and thermal energy-regulating systems. His group has achieved particular breakthroughs in controlling light-matter interactions using organic materials, where they pioneered the use of conducting polymers as reversibly switchable plasmonic materials and for thermal emission control. He is a Wallenberg Academy Fellow and has been awarded consolidator grants by the European Research Council and the Swedish Research Council. Beyond his research group, he is the director of a centre for micro- and nanofabrication at LiU and he has held positions as the vice head of division of LOE, deputy director of a strategic focus area on advanced functional materials at LiU, and chair of the Young Academy of Sweden. His background includes PhD from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and Wenner-Gren Fellow postdoc at Technical University of Delft.
Dr Ivana Qianqi Lin (MChem in Chemistry and PhD in Electrochemistry at Oxford, UK; PD in Nanophotonics at Cambridge, UK) joined the University of Twente in 2022 as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor, aiming to develop optics for molecular sensing towards applications in chips and reactors. Her research focuses on in-situ Raman spectroscopy to study interfacial processes.
Bruce Jun-Yu OuXuezhi ZhengBart de Nijs is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he leads the Physics for Sustainable Chemistry (PSC) group. His research centres on nanoscale optical energy utilisation through the design of self‑assembled plasmonic nano‑architectures. By creating extreme light confinement in molecular‑scale gaps, his group probes and controls chemical reactivity at heterogeneous interfaces, aiming to access new regimes in photophysics, photochemistry, and plasmonic catalysis.
He completed his PhD on nanoparticle self‑assembly at Utrecht University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Nanophotonics Centre in Cambridge, where he developed self‑assembled gold‑nanoparticle platforms for advanced sensing. He was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship and, in 2021, a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to establish his independent research programme.