ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Monticone receives inaugural dissertation prize from alma mater

Cornell ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Monticone was recently awarded the Margarida Jacome Dissertation Prize by the electrical and computer engineering department at UT  Austin for his dissertation, “Scattering Engineering at the Extreme with Metamaterials, Metasurfaces, and Nanostructures." This was the inaugural Jacome Dissertation Prize by the department for the best Ph.D. dissertation. At UT Austin, Monticone was advised by Dr.  Andrea Alù. He was presented the award by Dr. Lizy John during the ECE graduation banquet at UT Austin on May 8.

Dr. Monticone’s current research interests are in the areas of applied electromagnetics, metamaterials,  plasmonics, nanotechnology, and nanophotonics, with particular focus on innovative and extreme aspects of wave interaction with engineered materials and nanostructures. His recent research work spans a broad range of topics including extreme scattering engineering,  cloaking and invisibility, nanoparticles, nanocircuits, nanoantennas, parity-time symmetry, active devices and advanced metasurfaces.

Monticone  received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. (summa cum laude) degrees from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2009 and 2011, respectively. After  developing part of his graduate research work in Macquarie University,  Sydney, Australia, in 2011 he joined the Metamaterials and Plasmonics  Research Laboratory of Dr. Andrea Alù at The University of Texas at  Austin (UT), Austin, TX. Dr. Monticone received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from UT in 2016. In 2015, he also spent a few months as a visiting student researcher at the FOM Institute AMOLF, The Netherlands. He joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in January 2017.