Alumni Seminar by Giovanni Volpe

On Tuesday, June 16^th. Dr. Giovanni Volpe, ICFO Alumnus and Honorary Representative for the ICFO Alumni Network, offered an Alumni Seminar to share with ICFOnians some insights on his career path to date.

Giovanni defended his thesis in 2008 with a project on novel applications of photonic force microscopy supervised by Prof. Dmitri Petrov. After that he was a postdoc at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (2009-2011) and he was Assistant Professor at the Physics Department of Bilkent University (2012-2016). Nowadays, he is Full Professor at the Physics Department of the University of Gothenburg, where he leads the Soft Matter Lab since 2016.


While a PhD student in ICFO, you created the ICFO OSA Student Chapter together with GP Singh and conceived the IONS Project together with Armand Niederberger. What did you take out from those experiences as a Young PhD?
It was an opportunity to create something from scratch and see it growing. Which is a very good experience, especially when you are at the beginning of your career. Doing something that works out and grows beyond the expectations, motivates you to move forward.
At some point I stepped down from all these activities that I’ve started. I think it’s good to learn that eventually you need to let things go, because it allows you to focus on new challenges.

When you started in ICFO, you started working with Prof. Dima Petrov. He was clearly an important mentor for you, in your career. What was your experience working with him as a supervisor?
Dima was obviously a major influence. In general, your supervisor is going to be a major influence in your life. At the time, I don’t remember if I was aware of how strange it was, but something that surprises me is that he went to the lab with you. I don’t know many professors that physically go to the lab with the students and do the experiments with them. Being in the Lab with someone that has been doing experiments in Optics for 30 years was a unique opportunity.
I also remember during my master thesis how we worked on my first paper. I went there in the afternoon I sat down with Dima and we reviewed some parts of the paper. Then I worked on the paper in the evening, to give it back to him the next day and go over the paper, step by step.

How did that experience affect the way you mentor your own students?
Of course, I don’t go to the lab with every single student since it is a group of 15 people. However, I try to do so, especially with the new students. They have a continuous supervision for the first few months, very similar to how I learn to do it from Dima. This is not the standard approach, other professors at the university are very surprised that I write large parts of the code myself. Or even that I review the articles completely. That’s something I learned from Dima.

You spent time in different countries and environments from Bilkent to Gothenburg. What did you learn from those environments that has stayed with you throughout your career? Are there specific things that you’ve taken away?
The main message that I’ve got is that you need to adapt to the system where you are working. It’s pointless to say that it’s not the same to do science in Germany, Turkey, Sweden or Spain. There are completely different systems and they go by different rules and different interactions with people. The only way to be successful is to adapt to the different systems.
I was lucky enough to learn that skill at the very beginning of my PhD. Even before, at my Erasmus in Spain. At ICFO there was a very diverse international community of students from many different continents and I made friendships with lots of them. This allowed me to start seeing things from their point of view. Many things that in Italy would be normal, won’t be considered normal in Germany, and you need to be careful with that.
Different countries really go by different rules. You can’t go to a different country and try to impose your rules, because this will not work. I have seen lots of people try that and fail. If you plan to travel and work abroad, you have to get into the local culture. A thing I always did whenever I moved to a new country: I immediately started learning the language. This is a huge amount of effort, but I really think it is worth it.

You talk about lucky encounters with people and the willingness to say yes. This willingness to be broad and open to new things as opposed to be focused on one particular challenge, how did that help you in your career?
It’s a good question. I don’t necessarily advice people to do the same, because if you jump from field to field you end up not being identified with any of them. This is a risk; you need to be ready to take it. It went well for me, but this doesn’t mean that if I take it again, it will go well for me again. I would say that in my case, the very reason to do that is because I just enjoy doing things that are different, that’s why I jump from one field to the next one. I do science because it’s a hobby for me, so it must be amusing and interesting and novel. Otherwise I just get bored.
Let’s put it like that: it’s not a career advice. It worked well for me, but up to a certain point. Because also in many cases I left fields and then they became very strong fields. There are advantages and disadvantages.
If I look at my career now, it looks like everything makes sense. But it only makes sense once you look it in hindsight, not when you look at it from the beginning. I would not have guessed that I would end up working with Artificial Intelligence and Neurosciences. The crucial part is that one has to be open to opportunities, so if someone comes to you with a crazy idea, it’s probably worth it to listen to that person and see whether you can actually do something. A career path it only looks directed when you look at it at the end. This would be my message to you.

Your legacy is still very visible in ICFO. Thank you very much for your contributions.
I am very happy to have been in ICFO and obviously very happy that ICFO is now that successful. And also to have been there from the very beginning, because I could see history unfold in real time. That makes a big difference, because you can see how many people evolve and that gives you a feeling on how your career might evolve. I am very grateful for that.