Photonic Materials Group - Resume Albert Polman

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 Resume Albert Polman



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Albert Polman is a scientific group leader and director of the FOM-Institute AMOLF, a research laboratory of the Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM), in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is associated with the University of Amsterdam as a professor of photonic materials for photovoltaics. Polman is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Materials Research Society (USA) and recipient of ERC Advanced Investigator Grant. In 2012 he won the ENI Renewable Energy Prize, together with Harry Atwater.

Polman is one of the pioneers of the research field of nanophotonics: the control, understanding, and application of light at the nanoscale. Polman's research group specializes in fundamental studies at the interface between optical physics and materials science, and has regularly demonstrated transfer of knowledge to applied concepts.

Polman received his master's degree in physics (1985) and his Ph.D. degree in materials science (1989) from the University of Utrecht. From 1989 to 1991 he was a post-doctoral staff researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ). Since 1991 he has been associated with AMOLF, first as a group leader, since 1999 also as a department head. In 2005 he initiated the Center for Nanophotonics at AMOLF; in 2006 he was appointed as director of AMOLF. Polman was one of the initiators of the Amsterdam nanoCenter, a regional facility for nanofabrication founded in 2003. From March 2003 - February 2004 he was on sabbatical leave at CALTECH, where he was a research associate in the group of Prof. H.A. Atwater. He was adjunct professor of nanophotonics at the University of Utrecht from 1996-2011. Since 2012, Polman is professor of Photonic Materials for Photovoltaics at the University of Amsterdam.

Polman's main research interest is to control light at the nanoscale. His group studies the propagation, dispersion and confinement of light in metallic and dielectric nanostructures. He investigates optical metamaterials: artificially made materials with engineered permittivity and permeability. Polman is the inventor of Angle-Resolved Cathodoluminescence Imaging Spectroscopy (ARCIS), a novel imaging technique with deep-subwavelength resolution. A key topic in Polman's research concerns nanophotonic design principles to achieve ultra-high efficiency solar cells.

Polman's group has published over 200 articles in international journals, 80 conference proceedings, holds four patents and has six other patent applications pending. He has given over 100 invited talks at international conferences, several of them as plenary or keynote speaker. Polman's articles received more than 12.000 citations; his Hirsch index is 64 and his field-normalized citation impact is 5.18 times the world average. The relative representation of his papers in the top-1% best cited papers worldwide is 18.83.

Polman is member of the Executive Board of the NanoNextNL, a 125 M€ national nanoscience and technology program; program manager of the Nanophotonics program of the Dutch National Nanotechnology Program
NANONED; program manager of the FOM Program Nanophotovoltaics; member of the Steering Committee of Physics @ FOM Veldhoven, the yearly national physics conference in The Netherlands; member of the Steering Committee of the FOM-Philips Industrial Partnership Program Improved solid state light sources; and member of the Program Committee of the FOM-Shell/Helianthos Industrial Partnership Program Third generation solar cells. 

Polman is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of NanoLetters (Americal Chemical Society) and the Advisory Board of the Centre of Excellence for Advanced Silicon Photovoltaics and Photonics of the University of New South Wales (Australia). In 2004-2005 he served as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society (Pittsburgh). In 2007 he was elected member of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen). In 2009 he was elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW). In 2010 he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. In 2012 he won, together with Harry Atwater, the ENI Renewable Energy Prize, the main international prize for research on renewable energy 

Polman was chairman of the 11th International Conference on Ion Beam Modification of Materials in 1998 and served as secretary of the International Committee of IBMM until 2008. In 2008 he was appointed Honorary Member of the committee. He co-organized three symposia at meetings of the Materials Research Society, in 1994 (Boston), 1996 (San Francisco), and 1997 (San Francisco). He was Volume Organizer (editor) for the year-2000 volume of MRS Bulletin. In April 2003 he served as one of the meeting chairs of the MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco. He was co-chair of the Symposium Nanophotonic materials at the European Material Research Society Meeting (Strasbourg, 2004), and the OSA conference on Optical nanostructures and advanced materials for photovoltaics (Eindhoven, 2012).  He served on the program committee of many international conferences and workshops. Polman was chairman of the first Gordon Research Conference Plasmonics - optics at the nanoscale in 2006.
In 2010 he was appointed Fellow of the Materials Research Society.

Albert Polman is married to the musicologist Dr. Philomeen Lelieveldt; they have two children, Philine, and Fabian. In his free time he is member of the chamber choir  Vocaal Ensemble COQU.


last updated:  22-12-12