Profiles

Principal Investigators

Biography

Andrea Fratalocchi is a full professor in the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division at KAUST. He joined the University in January 2011 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2016. He is one of the founders of the CEMSE Division and the principal investigator of the Primalight Lab.

Before joining KAUST, Fratalocchi was a research fellow at Sapienza University of Rome under a KAUST Fellowship Award. From 2007 to 2009, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Sapienza University under a “New Talent” Award from the Enrico Fermi Research Center. He obtained a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2007 from the University of Roma Tre, Italy.

Fratalocchi’s career is marked by numerous accolades, including the GCC Enterprise Awards for Best Electrical Engineer of the Year in 2017, the Journal of Optics Outstanding Referee Award in 2017, the Nature Exceptional Referee Award in 2015, and an entry into the Guinness World Records for developing the “Darkest Material Made by Mankind” in 2015.

In 2019, he became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP), a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA).

Fratalocchi has authored over 200 publications, including three books and six patents. He ranks in the top 2% of optics researchers worldwide, based on the standardized citation index compiled by PLOS.

Research Interests

Professor Fratalocchi is dedicated to advancing the field of physics and engineering. His research approach harnesses the potential of complex physical systems, characterized by many degrees of freedom, turning them from theoretical challenges into real-world technological solutions with diverse applications.

His research embraces a nonlinear paradigm, departing from traditional "cause and effect" or linear thinking. This approach finds applications in diverse areas such as chaos theory, rare events, brain functions, natural mimicry and camouflage, swarm's cooperative dynamics and intelligence.

Using disorder as a building block, he proposes novel, low-cost, scalable technologies that outperform current systems by several orders of magnitude.

As part of his engineering research, he has developed world-record-performing nanomaterials for concentrating solar power, steam generation, desalination, solar water splitting, solar and chemical fuel production for carbon-negative technologies, artificial intelligence optical neural networks for hyperspectral imaging and sensing, and machine-learning nanomaterials for wave control and bioimaging, including early disease detection of cancer and diabetes.

Education
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Electrical Engineering, Roma Tre University, Italy, 2007
Master of Science (M.S.)
Electrical Engineering, Roma Tre University, Italy, 2003

Students

Biography

Arturo is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Following his participation in the KAUST's 2017 Photonics Summer Camp, he started his graduate studies at KAUST in August 2018. Prior to his graduate studies he earned B.Sc. in Engineering Physics from Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico) in 2017, and conducted a research intership in the Nuclear Sciences Institute (ICN) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 2016.

Arturo is the co-founder of Pixeltra Inc., a startup company specializing in multidimensional imaging solutions through metasurfaces. He actively serves as a reviewer for Nature Communications, and has authored ten publications in high-impact factor journals during his Ph.D. He received the Academic Excellence award from KAUST in 2022 and 2023, and was awarded 2nd place at the 2019 Falling Walls international pitching competition.

Research Interests

Arturo's research focuses on the design and fabrication of optical metasurfaces, emphasizing practical applications in remote sensing and hyperspectral imaging.

Education
Master of Science (M.S.)
Electrical and Computer Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, 2020
Bachelor of Science (B.S.)
Engineering Physics, Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico, 2017