The Institute welcomes new members

Two visiting professors, Victor Vysloukh and Mario Molina; three visiting scientists, Sergio Barreiro, Braulio García Cámara and Stefan Balint; four Postdoctoral researchers, Francois Dubin, Thorsten Ergler, Mathias Smolarski and Guillaume Baffou; and two undergraduate students, María Belén Pérez Ramírez and René Óscar Hernández Sánchez, have joined ICFO.

Prof. Victor Vyslouckh (Universidad de las Americas, México) and Prof. Mario Molina (Universidad de Chile) join Prof. Torner’s group as visiting professors. They will spend their sabbatical at ICFO, conducting research in optical solitons and their applications.

Dr. Sergio Barreiro joins Prof. Juan P. Torres’s group. During his stay, he will participate in several experiments currently running, or being planned, at ICFO, as well as in the design of new laser systems to be used for quantum optics applications.

Braulio García will work on the development of innovative evanescent-wave biosensors during his short stay within the Nanophotonic Devices group lead by Prof. Gonçal Badenes.

Stefan Balint joins Prof. Dmitri Petrov’s group. Balint is involved in experiments on using Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering and metal structures in detection of the spatial distribution of drugs in living cells.

Francois Dubin joins the ion trapping team with Prof. Jürgen Eschner as a postdoctoral researcher, working towards atom-photon interfaces and long-distance atomic teleportation.

Thorsten Ergler and Mathias Smoolarsky join Prof. Jens Biegert’s group. They will work on multi-particle coincidence measurements, attosecond spectroscopy and extreme nonlinear optics.

Guillaume Baffou joins Prof. Romain Quidant’s group. Baffou will study the confinement of light field at the subwavelength scale in complex plasmonic structures.

María Belén Pérez Ramírez joins Pablo Loza’s group. Pérez will be part of the Neuronal Guidance Research Project. She will play an active role in the establishment of the underlying mechanism behind the fillopodia attraction towards light. Moreover she will be part of the C. elegans Research Project in neuron axotomy.

René Óscar Hernández Sánchez joins Pablo Loza’s group. Hernández will be working in the Pulse-shaping Microscopy Project. He will work on controlling the amplitude and phase of ultrashort pulses from fibre optic devices such as tapered fibres and photonic crystal fibres. At the same time, he will be working on developing new compact lasers (based on Yb:KYW) for its use in nonlinear microscopy.