Scientific Career Albert Polman

Short resume - Scientific highlights - List of publications

Albert Polman is a scientific group leader and director of the FOM-Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics, a research laboratory of the Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is associated with the University of Utrecht as a professor of nanophotonics and is part-time visiting associate in the Faculty of Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. Polman was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) in 2009.

Polman is one of the pioniers 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 and engineering (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.

Polman's main research interest is to control light at the nanoscale. His group studies the propagation, dispersion and confinement of light in metallic nanostructures using surface plasmons. Furthermore, his group studies optical metamaterials: artificially made materials with engineered permittivity and permeability, that posses a negative index of refraction. Part of Polman's research focusses on using nanophotonic insights to improve the efficeincy of thin-film solar cells.

Polman's group has published 200 articles in international journals, 80 conference proceedings, holds four patents, and has given over 80 invited talks at international conferences. Polman's articles received more than 7800 citations; his field-averaged citation impact factor is 3.18 and his Hirsch index 48.

Polman is member of the steering committee of the National Nano Initiative (NNI), program manager of the Nanophotonics program of the Dutch National Nanotechnology Program NANONED, program manager of the FOM Program Nanophotovoltaics, and member of the Program Committee for the FOM-Shell program on Third generation solar cells. In 2004 he co-initiated the FOM-Philips program Microphotonic Light Sources. In 2005, he co-authored the national Nanoscience strategy initiative for FOM/NWO. Polman is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of NanoLetters (Americal Chemical Society), the Advisory Editorial Board of Physica B (Elsevier), the Advisory Board of the Photonics Research Institute COBRA of the Technical University Eindhoven, the International Advisory Board of the University of Surrey Ion Beam Centre, the Materials Science Advisory Board of the Research Center Rossendorf (Germany) 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 was 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).

Polman was chairman of the 11^th 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 was a member of the program committee of the International Conference on Group-IV photonics (Hongkong, 2004; Antwerp, 2005), of the Microcavities subcommittee of the European Quantum Electronics Conference (Munich, 2005). He is a member of the International Advisory Committee of the International Conference on Group-IV photonics (Sorrento, 2008, San Francisco, 2009) and the Nanooptics and plasmonics subcommittee of the International Quantum Electronics Conference (Baltimore, 2009). Polman was chairman of the first Gordon Research Conference Plasmonics - optics at the nanoscale in 2006.

Albert Polman is married to the musicologist Dr. Philomeen Lelieveldt; they have two children, Philine (12), and Fabian (10), and he and Philomeen are active as singers in the chamber choir Vocaal Ensemble COQU.