Foremost Photonics 2022: re-launching nanophotonics research in Europe

by Virginia Greco

The workshop was organised by a new generation of nanophotonics researchers and funded by the Nanophotonics Europe Association, a network that emerged from the EU funded PhOREMOST project, in which Prof. Dr Clivia Sotomayor-Torres and other members of the research group that she leads at the ICN2 were involved.

The Foremost Photonics 2022 workshop, organised by the Nanophotonics Europe Association (NEA), was held in Erice (Italy) at the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture from 10 till 14 October. It brought together key players in nanophotonics, who discussed their latest research results and shared their vision about the future of the field and actions to put in place to advance young researchers’ career in this field.

Among the scientists from the ICN2 that participated in the workshop are Prof. Laura M. Lechuga, leader of the Nanobiosensors and Bioanalytical Applications Group, who gave a presentation about “nanophotonics biosensors for ultrasensitive health diagnostics at the point-of-need", and ICREA Prof. Dr Clivia Sotomayor-Torres, leader of the ICN2 Phononic and Photonic Nanostructures Group, who was one of the panellists of the roundtable discussion that took place on October 12 and who talked about “the need for associations and collaborative projects in science”.

The Nanophotonics Europe Association (NEA) emerged from the EU Network of Excellence established with PhOREMOST, a project funded through the EU-FP6 programme between 2004 and 2009. The mission of NEA is to promote research, technology transfer and innovation in nanophotonics. It supports the training of researchers, promotes scientific excellence, and facilitates partnerships between academia and industry. It has also produced or contributed to the writing of various documents, including a Roadmap on Nanophotonics published in 2008, which was the first worldwide about this topic and was followed by similar ones in the USA and Japan.

The Association’s founding members are the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2, Barcelona, Spain), the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO, Barcelona, Spain), the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS, Florence, Italy) and the Sapienza University of Rome (Italy).

As proposed by the Board of the Nanophotonics Europe Association, of which Prof. Clivia Sotomayor-Torres is a founding member, the organization of the workshop was led by three young scientists, who developed their PhD theses when the PhOREMOST project was active: Dr Costanza Toninelli, leader of the Quantum Nanophotonics group at LENS, Dr Marco Centini, associate professor at the Sapienza University of Rome, and Dr Pedro David García, a former member of Prof. Sotomayor-Torres’ group and currently a staff researcher at the Material Science Institute of Madrid (ICMM-CSIC, Spain).