Plenary Speakers

Marko Lončar is Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard’s John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Lončar received his Diploma from University of Belgrade (R. Serbia) in 1997, and PhD from Caltech in 2003 (with Axel Scherer), both in Electrical Engineering. After completing his postdoctoral studies at Harvard (with Federico Capasso), he joined Harvard faculty in 2006. Lončar is expert in nanophotonics and nanofabrication, and his group has done pioneering work in the field of quantum and nonlinear nanophotonics. In particular, Lončar is recognized for his work on the development of diamond and thin film lithium niobate nanophotonic platforms. Lončar has co-authored more than 250 manuscripts in top scientific journals and has given more than 300 invited talks and seminars. He has received NSF CAREER Award in 2009, Sloan Fellowship in 2010, Marko Jarić Foundation Award in 2020, and Microoptics Conference Award in 2023. In recognition of his teaching activities, Lončar has been awarded Harvard University Levenson Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2012), and has been named Harvard College Professor in 2017. Lončar is Fellow of Optical Society of America and IEEE, as well as Senior Member of SPIE. He is co-founder of HyperLight Corporation (Cambridge, MA), VC backed startup commercializing lithium-niobate technology developed in his lab.

Scott Papp is a Group Leader in NIST’s Time and Frequency Division. He received a Ph.D in 2008 from University of Colorado for experiments on long-sought beyond-mean-field physics in Bose-Einstein condensates. Then he worked at Caltech as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Physics of Information on quantum memories and multipartite entanglement. At NIST, he leads investigations of frequency combs, integrated nonlinear nanophotonics, quantum sensors, advanced communication and computing architectures, and deployment of technology ranging from astronomy to commercialization.