The University of Connecticut, Department of Physics, is proud to announce the 28th Annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer on Friday, October 16, 2026, by Professor Federico Capasso.
Federico Capasso is Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. He received the Doctor of Physics degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Rome, Italy, in 1973 and after doing research in fiber optics at Fondazione Ugo Bordoni in Rome, joined Bell Labs in 1976. He was Vice President of Physical Research (2000-2002) before joining Harvard. He and his collaborators made many wide-ranging contributions to semiconductor devices, pioneering the design technique known as band-structure engineering. He applied it to novel low noise quantum well avalanche photodiodes, heterojunction transistors, memory devices and lasers. He and his collaborators invented and demonstrated the quantum cascade laser (QCL).
His honors include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and honorary membership in the Franklin Institute.
In 2005 he received, jointly with Nobel Laureates Frank Wilczek and Anton Zeilinger, the King Faisal International Prize for Science for his research on quantum cascade lasers. The citation called him “one of the most creative and influential physicists in the world.” The international society of optics and photonics (SPIE), selected Capasso to receive the 2013 SPIE Gold Medal, the highest honor the society bestows. He received the Frederic Ives Medal Prize from the Optical Society of America (the highest honor of the society in 2019) for seminal and wide-ranging contributions to optical physics, quantum electronics and nanophotonics.
He is also the recipient of the IEEE Edison Medal, Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science, the Chisesi-Tomassoni award, the John Price Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute, the R. W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America, the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society W. Streifer Award, the Materials Research Society Medal, the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics (UK), the Duddell Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (UK), the Willis Lamb Medal for Laser Science and Quantum Optics, the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton “Leonardo da Vinci” Prize (France), the Welker Memorial Medal (Germany), the New York Academy of Sciences Award, the IEEE David Sarnoff Award in Electronics, the Goff Smith prize of the University of Michigan, the Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis for research in applied laser technology and the Julius Springer Prize in Applied Physics, the Jan Czochralski Medal of the European Materials Research society for his lifetime achievements in Materials Science, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Applied Photonics and the Matteucci Medal in 2019 from the Italian National Academy of Sciences for his invention of the quantum cascade laser.
For details of the lecture please see the Web Calendar post.
Prof. Vladan Vuletić, Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT, is a leading figure in atomic, molecular, and optical physics, with pioneering contributions to quantum science and technology. Born in Peć, Serbia (then Yugoslavia), and educated in Germany. In 1992, he earned his Physics Diploma with highest honors from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and in 1997, a Ph.D. in Physics (summa cum laude). He then conducted postdoctoral research with Nobel Laureate Steven Chu at Stanford University as a Lynen Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation. After faculty appointments at Stanford and MIT, he rose to the rank of Full Professor at MIT in 2011. Vuletic is Director of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms and Chair of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Science of the American Physical Society.
Debadarshini (Jolly) Mishra successfully defended her PhD thesis in May 2024 in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics. Jolly gave several presentations at national and international conferences and is the co-author of 8 publications. She is now a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and was hired before her thesis defense to contribute her research and learn new research techniques.
As part of his Ph.D. project, Jonathan Mercedes-Feliz has made very important contributions to our understanding of the interplay between supermassive black holes and galaxies using state-of-the-art supercomputing simulations that for the first time model the propagation and impact of powerful black hole-driven winds from the very center of galaxies all the way to the intergalactic medium. Using novel data analysis approaches, Jonathan has shown that these powerful winds can simultaneously enhance the rate of formation of stars in localized regions while dramatically suppressing the global growth of massive galaxies, explaining seemingly contradictory results from recent observations and previous theoretical models. Besides excelling in research, Jonathan is deeply committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, and he has been an invaluable mentor for undergraduate and high school students from historically excluded groups as part of the McNair Scholars program, the Center for Access and Postsecondary Success (CAPS) Summer Program, and the YSSS Jack Kent Cooke Scholars program at UConn. With his published Ph.D. work already attracting significant attention in the community, Jonathan has accepted a postdoctoral research position funded by the NASA Astrophysics Theory Program to lead the next generation of simulations modeling the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies as part of Prof. Anglés-Alcázar’s group at the University of Connecticut.
Adam Riess is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, a distinguished astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1996. His research involves measurements of the cosmological framework with supernovae (exploding stars) and Cepheids (pulsating stars). Currently, he leads the SHOES Team in efforts to improve the measurement of the Hubble Constant and the Higher-z Team to find and measure the most distant type Ia supernovae known to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration.