Nader Engheta

Biography

One of the top 50 leaders in science and technology according to Scientific American magazine, Nader Engheta’s pioneering work has profoundly impacted electromagnetics and spurred the growth of many subdisciplines such as metamaterials, nanoscale optics, bio-inspired imaging, and fractional electromagnetics. Dr. Engheta paved the way to the characterization of metamaterials with groundbreaking electromagnetics concepts during the 1990s. He formalized wave propagation in chiral materials and developed the omega media concept, both fundamental to the development and operation of most metamaterials. One of his trailblazing contributions was the development of the new area of optical metatronics, i.e., metamaterial-based optical nanocircuitry. These circuits operate via light at the nanoscale using lumped-element metamaterial nanostructures as inductors and capacitors. Dr. Engheta also contributed to producing metamaterial lenses that can go beyond the diffraction limit inherent to conventional optical lenses. He proposed a far-field super lens made out of shells of alternating dielectric and plasmonic materials capable of projecting a super-resolution image to the far field.

An IEEE Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of four other scientific organizations (APS, OSA, AAAS, and SPIE), Dr. Engheta is currently the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering and a Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.