Featured Speakers

Prof. Ekaterina Iordanova

Prof. Ekaterina Iordanova is a distinguished physicist and Director of the Georgi Nadjakov Institute of Solid State Physics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her expertise lies in ultrafast laser and plasma science, nonlinear optics, and advanced nanostructured materials - domains critically aligned with the future of emerging memory technologies and novel computing paradigms.

Her research focuses on ultrafast laser-matter interaction, laser-induced nuclear reactions, and the nonlinear optical properties of functional and bio-inspired materials. These efforts are directly relevant to developing neuromorphic computing platforms, high-speed memory devices, and energy-efficient processing architectures.

Through EU-funded research programs, Prof. Iordanova has strategically advanced Bulgaria's scientific infrastructure in nanoscience and photonics. She is an active member of the International Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI ERIC). She serves as an Expert Advisor to its General Assembly, helping to shape policy and long-term scientific direction across Europe's most advanced laser research facilities.

Her work builds critical bridges between solid-state physics, material science, and emerging computational technologies - making her an influential voice in the evolution of next-generation memory and computing systems.

Prof. J. Joshua Yang

J. Joshua Yang is the Arthur B. Freeman Chair professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. His current research interest is Post-CMOS hardware for neuromorphic computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, where he published several pioneering papers and holds 120 granted US Patents. He is the Founding Chair of the IEEE Neuromorphic Computing Technical Committee and the director of USC-Airforce Center of Excellent on Neuromorphic Computing. He is an Associate Editor of Science Advances (AAAS). He was elected to the IEEE Fellow and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow for his contributions to resistive switching materials and devices for nonvolatile memory and neuromorphic computing.

Prof. Yoshihiro Iwasa

Yoshihiro Iwasa earned his Ph.D. in 1986 from The University of Tokyo, where he later held positions as a research associate and then a lecturer. In 1993-1994, he was a visiting scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, USA. In 1994, Iwasa was promoted to associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), before ascending to the position of full professor at the Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University in 2001. In 2010, he made the move to the Department of Applied Physics at The University of Tokyo. Iwasa transitioned in 2024 to RIKEN as a deputy director of Center for Emergent Matter Science. His research expertise lies in the realm of nanomaterial physics including 2D materials through an interdisciplinary device concept, iontronics that means ion-driven electronics.

Prof. Alberto Salleo

Alberto Salleo is the Hong Seh and Vivian W.M. Lim Professor in the School of Engineering and Chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Salleo obtained his Laurea degree in Chemistry from the University of Rome in 1994, his PhD in Materials Science from UC Berkeley in 2001 and was a post-doc at Xerox PARC until 2005. His research focuses on the characterization and use of conjugated polymers in optoelectronics and bioelectronics. Salleo is a Clarivate highly cited researcher since 2015, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the Materials Research Society and the European Academy of Sciences as well as a member of Academia Europaea. He was awarded the 2010 SPIE Early Career Award in 2010 and the Gores Award for excellence in teaching, Stanford’s university-wide highest teaching honor, in 2016.

Prof. Simon Brown

Prof. Simon Brown is a physicist at the University of Canterbury and a Principal Investigator in the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. His current work focuses on nano-electronic devices with brain-like properties, and in particular on percolating networks of nanoparticles. In the past few years his group have demonstrated a range of applications, including speech recognition and integer factorization. Simon holds a number of patents and was founder of NZ’s first nanotechnology company.

Prof. Huaqiang Wu

Prof. Huaqiang Wu is the Dean of School of Integrated Circuits, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He received the bachelor degree in MSE from Tsinghua University in 2000 and a Ph.D. in EE from Cornell University in 2005. After that, he worked for AMD and Spansion as Senior Research Engineer, working on advanced Flash memory devices. He joined Tsinghua University as associate professor in 2009 and became full professor in 2018.

His research topics include emerging memory devices and alternative computing paradigms, and he has authored over 200 journal papers and conference proceedings in Science, Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Electronics, ISSCC, IEDM, VLSI, etc. He holds over 100 patents in the US and China, with more than 30 commercialized, and has incubated four high-tech companies, successfully bringing resistive memory technology to market.

He serves as an associate editor of IEEE EDL and TCAS-II, the TPC chair of EDTM 2021, and TPC member of VLSI and VLSI-TSA. He has given multiple invited talks at IEDM, IRPS, IMW, MRS, GLS-VLSI, etc.

Prof. Jun Takeya

Jun Takeya is a professor in Department of Advanced Materials Science, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo from 2013 and is jointly appointed for an honored visiting researcher in National Institute for Material Science from 2017. He is also CTO of Pi-Crystal Inc. from 2013 and Organo-Circuit Inc. from 2016 both of which are start-ups founded on his scientific achievement in organic electronics. He received the B.S. degree in 1989, the M.S. degree in 1991, and Ph.D. degree in 2001 from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, all in physics. He was a research scientist in Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, from 1991 to 2006, a visiting researcher in ETH, Zurich, Switzerland, from 2001 to 2002, a visiting researcher in RIKEN, Japan, from 2005 to 2006, a visiting associate professor in IMR, Tohoku University, Japan, from 2005 to 2006, and an associate professor in Graduate School of Science, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, from 2006 to 2010. He was a professor in the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, from 2010 to 2013.

Prof. C. Daniel Frisbie

Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science, University of Minnesota, USA

C. Daniel Frisbie is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science (CEMS) at the University of Minnesota. He was Head of CEMS from 2014-2024. He obtained a PhD in physical chemistry from MIT in 1993 and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard. His research focuses on materials and processes for large area printed electronics and photonics. Additional topics include organic semiconductors and devices, electrochemical transistors, molecular electronics, and scanning probe microscopy. During academic year 2024-25, he is completing a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge with financial support from the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society/Wolfson Foundation.

Prof. Themis Prodromakis

Professor Themis Prodromakis holds the Regius Chair of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh and is Director of the Centre for Electronics Frontiers. His work focuses on developing energy-efficient AI hardware solutions through innovating novel semiconductor technologies and neuromorphic computing architectures. He leads an interdisciplinary team comprising 50 researchers with expertise across materials process development to electron devices and circuits and systems for applications in embedded systems and AI. He holds an RAEng Chair in Emerging Technologies and is Adjunct Professor at UTS Australia and Honorary Fellow at Imperial College London. He is Fellow of the British Computer Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the IET and the Institute of Physics. He is the Director of the UKRI APRIL AI Hub that is developing AI tools and capabilities for the electronics sector. In 2015, he established ArC Instruments Ltd that delivers high-performance testing infrastructure for automating characterisation of novel nanodevices in over 26 countries. His contributions in memristive technologies and applications have brought this emerging technology one step closer to the electronics industry for which he was recognised as a 2021 Blavatnik Award UK Honoree in Physical Sciences and Engineering.

Dr. Abu Sebastian

Dr. Abu Sebastian is a Distinguished Scientist and technical manager at IBM Research – Zurich. He is one of the technical leaders of IBM’s research efforts towards next generation AI Hardware and manages the in-memory computing group at IBM Research - Zurich. He is the author of over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals/conference proceedings and holds over 100 US patents.  In 2015 he was awarded the European Research Council (ERC) consolidator grant and in 2020, he was awarded an ERC Proof-of-concept grant. He was an IBM Master Inventor and was named Principal and Distinguished Research Staff Member in 2018 and 2020, respectively. In 2019, he received the Ovshinsky Lectureship Award for his contributions to "Phase-change materials for cognitive computing". In 2023, he was conferred the title of Visiting Professor in Materials by University of Oxford. He is a distinguished lecturer and fellow of the IEEE.

Prof. Yang Chai

Prof. Yang Chai is the Chair Professor of Semiconductor Physics of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, an IEEE Fellow, an Optica Fellow, the Vice President of the Physical Society of Hong Kong, a member of The Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences, and an Associate Editor of ACS Nano. He is a receipt of the Falling Walls Science Breakthroughs in Engineering and Technology for his work on “Breaking the Wall of Efficient Sensory AI Systems” and the BOCHK Science and Technology Innovation Prize. His current research interest mainly focuses on emerging electronic devices.

Prof. Juerg Leuthold

Juerg Leuthold is the head of the department of Information Science and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) and he is the head of the Institute of Electromagnetic Fields (IEF) of ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His interests are in the field of atomic-scale (memristive), photonics, plasmonics, THz with an emphasis on applications in communications and sensing. He was formerly affiliated with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, where he was the Head of the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics (IPQ) and the Helmholtz Institute of Microtechnology (IMT) in the time from 2004 to 2013. From 1999 to 2004, he was with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, NJ, USA, where he performed device and system research with III/V semiconductors and silicon photonics for applications in high-speed telecommunications. Juerg Leuthold received the Ph.D. degree in physics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland for work in the field of integrated optics and all-optical communications in 1998.

Prof. Alberto Morpurgo

Alberto Morpurgo is a condensed matter physicist, with a broad interest in the electronic properties of materials and devices. He received his PhD in 1998 from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) for his thesis on mescocopic physics, for which he also received the Miedema Prize 1998 for the best Dutch PhD thesis. After a postdoctoral stay at Stanford University, Alberto Morpurgo moved to Delft University, where he became associate professor. In 2008, Alberto Morpurgo moved to University of Geneva, Switzerland, as full professor. The research of Prof. Morpurgo has covered a broad variety of material systems (III-V heterostructures, carbon nanotubes, superconductors, organic semiconductors, topological insulators) and physics problems (superconductivity, phase coherent transport, semiconductor physics, electron-electron interaction effects, magnetism etc.). Since the original discovery of graphene, Prof. Morpurgo has been working with increasing intensity in the field of 2D materials and heterostructures.

Prof. Tony Kenyon

Tony Kenyon is Professor of Nanoelectronic & Nanophotonic Materials, and Vice Dean (Strategy), at UCL (University College London). He is  Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Engineering and Technology, ad a Senior Member of the IEEE. He is also currently the President of the Materials Research Society (E-MRS). His research is in the field of memristive materials and devices for novel memories, next generation computing and neuromorphic technology. He has co-founded a spin-out company, Intrinsic Semiconductor Technologies Ltd, to commercialise his work on silicon oxide resistance switches. The company is based in the UK, with a subsidiary in the USA, and has raised £15 million to date.

Prof. R. Stanley Williams

R. Stanley Williams received a B.A. degree in Chemical Physics in 1974 from Rice University in Houston, Texas and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from University of California Berkeley in 1978 for synchrotron-based photoelectron spectroscopy research. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1978-80, and a faculty member (Assistant, Associate and Full Professor) of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1980 – 1995. He joined Hewlett-Packard Labs in 1995 to found the Quantum Science Research group, which originally focused on fundamental research at the nanometer scale. His primary scientific research during the past forty years has been in the areas of solid-state chemistry and physics, and their applications to technology in general and computing in particular. In 2008, a team of researchers he led announced that they had reduced to practice the first intentional memristor, first predicted by Leon Chua 37 years earlier. In 2018 he returned to academe as the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Chair in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Texas A&M University, where he is presently the Director of the US DOE Energy Frontier Research Center, Reconfigurable Electronic Materials Inspired by Nonlinear Neuron Dynamics (REMIND). He has received awards for business, scientific and academic achievement, including being elected to the US National Academy of Inventors in 2022, the 2021 Diels-Planck Medal for Nanotechnology awarded by Kiel University, Germany, the 2019 Sir Neville Mott Lecturer at Loughborough University UK, the 2009 EETimes Innovator of the Year ACE Award, the 2007 Glenn T. Seaborg Medal for contributions to Chemistry, the 2004 Herman Bloch Medal for Industrial Research, the 2000 Julius Springer Award for Applied Physics and the 2000 Feynman Award in Nanotechnology. He has over 230 issued US patents, 490 papers in reviewed scientific journals, and an h-index of 130 on Google Scholar.

See the following link for further information: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dAFE2L8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Prof. Bilge Yildiz

Bilge Yildiz is the Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor in the Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Departments at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she leads the Laboratory for Electrochemical Interfaces. Yildiz’s research focuses on laying the scientific groundwork to enable next generation electrochemical devices for energy conversion and information processing. The scientific insights derived from her research guide the design of novel materials and interfaces for efficient and durable solid oxide fuel cells, electrolytic water splitting, brain-inspired computing, and solid state batteries. Yildiz’s approach combines computational and experimental analyses at the atomic and electronic level, using in situ scanning tunneling and X-ray spectroscopy together with first-principles calculations and novel atomistic simulations. Yildiz’s teaching and research efforts have been recognized by the Argonne Pace Setter (2006), ANS Outstanding Teaching (2008), NSF CAREER (2011), IU-MRS Somiya (2012), the ECS Charles Tobias Young Investigator (2012), the ACerS Ross Coffin Purdy (2018), the LG Chem Global Innovation Contest (2020), Rahmi M. Koc Medal of Science (2022), and the Faraday Medal of the RSC (2024) awards. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2021), the Royal Society of Chemistry (2022), and the Electrochemical Society (2023) and an elected member of the Austrian Academy of Science (2023).

Prof. Ronald Tetzlaff

Ronald Tetzlaff (Senior Member IEEE) is head of the Chair of Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering at TU Dresden. His scientific interests include problems in the theory of modelling and identification of electronic systems, AI methods, machine learning, mem-elements, memristive systems, mem- and neuromorphic computing, Volterra systems, Cellular Nonlinear Networks, medical signal processing, and in the theory of stochastic processes. Ronald Tetzlaff has been an associate editor of various journals and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE, Transactions on Circuits and Systems: part II. He was the chair and member scientific and organizing committees of several international conferences. From 2014 to 2018 he served as the leader of working group two (Memristor Theory, Modelling and Simulation) in the EU COST action MemoCIS (IC 1401) on Memristors - Devices, Models, Circuits, Systems and Applications. He serves as a reviewer for several journals and for the European Commission. Since 2021, he has been the coordinator of the DFG-funded MemrisTec priority program and was one of the co-founders of the international Chua Memristor Center (CMC) in 2016. Since 2020, he has been Chief Officer Technology Transfer and Internationalization in the Rectorate of TU Dresden. He is a member of the Informationstechnische Gesellschaft (ITG), the German Society of Electrical Engineers, and of the German URSI Committee.

Dr Burkhard Beckhoff

Dr Burkhard Beckhoff is head of the X-ray spectrometry working group at PTB, Germany's national metrology institute. He studied physics in Germany and France. After his PhD in physics, he joined the PTB department of metrology with synchrotron radiation where he developed various research activities in the field of surface and interface characterisation of nanoscale samples from nanoelectronics, biotechnology, energy conversion and storage. He was involved in the acquisition of more than 20 European (FP6, Horizon, EMPIR, EPM) and 10 German (DFG, BMBF, MNPQ, WIPANO) research projects, several of which he coordinated. He was initiator and co-organiser of the ALTECH symposia on techniques for the characterisation of nanomaterials at the E-MRS Spring Conference 2014 to 2024, co-editor of the Springer handbook "Handbook of Practical X-ray Fluorescence Analysis" and co-organiser of the international roadmap generation of the "International Initiative on X-Ray Fundamental Parameters" (www.exsa.hu/fpi.php). Since 2000, he has been co-organiser of the research seminar "Modern Analytical Methods in Physics" at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB). In 2018 he received the "outstanding career award" of the European X-ray Spectrometry Association (EXSA). Since 2022 he is chairman of the standardisation committee ISO/TC 201 (Surface Chemical Analysis) SG2 (Energy materials).