Luca Dal Negro Promoted to Full ECE Professorship
By Shereen Abubakr (QST ’18)
Professor Luca Dal Negro, PhD (ECE, MSE, Physics) was promoted to the rank of Professor in Boston University’s College of Engineering.
Luca Dal Negro specializes in optics, nanophotonics, plasmonics, and the development of optical materials that advance on-chip optical sensing, light emission, energy conversion, and thin-film solar cell technology. Dal Negro is the group leader of the Nanomaterials and Nanostructure Optics (NaNO) Lab. The research group is focused on the nanofabrication, linear/nonlinear optical characterization and electromagnetic modeling of metal-dielectric nanomaterials and nanostructures for on-chip nanophotonics applications. With over 200 publications authored/coauthored, Dal Negro has made significant research contributions in the areas of optics, plasmonics, and complex photonic nanostructures with engineered scattering and wave localization properties.
Dal Negro joined Boston University’s ECE Department in 2006, and quickly achieved success in 2007 when he received the Dean’s Cataylst Award from BU’s College of Engineering. Two years later, in 2009, he won another College of Engineering award, the “Early Career Research Excellence Award.” In 2017, Dal Negro was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America “for his numerous contributions in the theoretical and experimental aspects of wave interaction with aperiodic nanostructures, nanophotonics and plasmonics leading to novel engineering applications to optical sensing, light emission, energy harvesting and nonlinear optical devices.” He has served on the editorial boards of two leading international journals in materials and photonics systems and has also authored numerous book chapters and widely cited journal articles. As a past NSF Career Award recipient, Dal Negro is supported by several major current grants from NSF and the U.S. Army. Professor Dal Negro received his PhD from the University of Trento, Italy in 2003.