Alexandra Boltasseva, the Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Alexandra Boltasseva, the Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes Professor of ECE, has been named a fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS). The MRS Fellows program recognizes outstanding contributions to the field, including research, leadership, and service that have advanced the mission of the materials community world-wide. It is intended to be a lifetime recognition of distinction in the field, rather than an award for a specific achievement. The number of Fellows is capped at 0.2% of the current total professional MRS membership. Boltasseva is being recognized “for her contributions to plasmonic and optical metamaterials including as plasmonic waveguides for on-chip circuitry, high-temperature nanophotonics, optical structures with extremely low refractive index, and tunable plasmonics.”

Boltasseva joins two other Purdue ECE faculty members as MRS Fellows. Haiyan Wang, the Basil S. Turner Professor of Engineering, was named an MRS Fellow in 2019 "for innovative research on multifunctional ceramic nanocomposites, superconductors, solid oxide fuel cells and in situ TEM, and for inspired materials science education and leadership." Vladimir M. Shalaev, was named an MRS Fellow in 2015 “for pioneering studies of metamaterials, including the first optical negative-index material, broadband optical magnetism, new plasmonic refractory materials and ultrathin optical components."

Boltasseva holds 11 U.S. patents and one patent in Japan. Her contributions to the field of plasmonics are opening up new ways to focus and manipulate light at the nanometer scale. Her innovations have inspired low-power nanometer-scale optical and optoelectronic components such as tiny optical modulators and photodetectors, as well as nanoscale power-efficient light sources that have the potential to transform the fields of opto- and nanoelectronics, on-chip optical communication, and data recording storage and transmission.

Her work has received 22,249 citations (H-index of 69). She is the author of the most cited paper of Laser and Photonics Reviews journal (out of more than 600 papers) and the two most cited papers in the Optical Society of America’s Optical Materials Express (out of more than 2,000). In November 2020, she was named to the list of Highly Cited Researchers 2020 from the Web of Science Group. She has been featured as an invited speaker at 115 conferences, including five plenary and six keynote talks.

Among a select list of Boltasseva’s awards, she is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2020), finalist for the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists in Physical Sciences and Engineering (2018), Materials Research Society Young Investigator Award (2013), IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award (2013), and MIT Technology Review’s Global List of Innovators Under 35 (2011). She is a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE - 2020), Optical Society of America (OSA - 2015) and International Society for Optical Engineers (SPIE - 2017).