The annual Beyond ICFO career event looks to members of our Alumni Network to share aspects of their experience post ICFO to help guide current ICFOnians who are considering the next professional options.

This year, in response to feedback especially from our postdoctoral community, we are focusing on careers in academia, and in particular the funding available in various regions around the world for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) as they transition from supervised to independent research careers.

TENTATIVE AGENDA:

10.30h Welcome

10.40 Alumni presentations and panel

11.30 Networking coffee break

PANELLISTS:

Carsten Schuck: Professor, Institute of Physics Center for NanoTechnology (CENTech) University of Münster (DE).

After completing his PhD at ICFO in 2010 in the group led by J. Eschner, Carsten received a DFG Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at Yale University (USA, 2010-2014). Following this position, he moved to ASML Research as an Architect (Netherlands, 2015-2016) before returning to Academia as an Assistant Professor at University of Münster (2016-2021) through the NRW Return Program. He is the a co-founder of Pixel Photonics GmbH (Münster 2021), through the Exist Program and is currently Full Professor & Director of the Department for Quantum Technology (since 2021), with funding from DFG, BMBF, EC, NRW

Natalia Bruno: Research Staff, Istituto Nazionale di Ottica - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, (IT). 

Natalia received her PhD from University Geneva in 2015 and worked as a postdoc (ICFONEST fellowship) at ICFO from 2015 to 2019 in the group led by Morgan Mitchell. She is now a tenured researcher at the National Institute of Optics of the Italian National Research Council (CNR-INO, Florence) affiliated to LENS (European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy). In 2022, she was one of the 15 L’Oréal-UNESCO International Rising Talent laureates, after receiving the L’Oréal Italia-UNESCO award in 2021. She is leading the Yb-Cavity lab in Florence, funded mainly by national projects (PNRR, Italian Space Agency), where she traps single Yb atoms for generation of atom-photon entanglement at telecom wavelength. She is also part of the CNR Gender Equality Team, contributing to the training of CNR personnel on diversity.

Marti Perarnau: Ramon y Cajal Fellow, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ES).

Martí earned his PhD at ICFO in 2016 in the group led by Antonio Acín. Afterwards, he was a Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (2017–2019) and later an SNF Ambizione fellow at the University of Geneva. Since 2024, he has been at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, first as a Ramón y Cajal and currently as an ATRAE fellow.

Nicoletta Liguori: Group Leader, ICFO (ES).

Nicoletta Liguori is an experimental and computational physicist with expertise in molecular biophysics. She graduated cum laude in physics at Uni Roma Tre (IT), after an MSc thesis at UC Berkeley (US). For her Ph.D., she joined the group of R. Croce at the VU Amsterdam (NL). In 2018 she obtained a competitive national grant (VENI) from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), that allowed her to establish her independent research line at the VU Amsterdam. In October 2022, N.L. was appointed Group Leader at ICFO. She leads fast-growing international research group, and received national and European funds amongst which the ERC STG, La Caixa Junior Leader, RyC, MSCA Doctoral Network.

CHAIR: Amaris Guevara, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Single Molecule Biophotonics group led by Prof. María García-Parajo.

Hosted by ICFO Alumni Network