Nicolò Maccaferri

I am the head of the Ultrafast Nanoscience Group at the Department of Physics, Umeå University (Sweden). Since 2023, I am also Principal Investigator at the Umeå Centre of Microbial Research (UCMR), and an Affiliated researcher at Integrated Science Lab (IceLab).  My research spans a broad range of fundamental and applied aspects of natural sciences, with a special focus on both the fundamental and applied aspects of light-matter interactions in advanced and multifunctional nano- and meta-materials for opto-electronics and information processing, photochemistry and biotechnology, by using frequency- and time-resolved (magneto-)optical spectroscopy, finite-element computational methods and bottom-up/top-down nanofabrication techniques (for a brief introduction on nano- and meta-materials, you can watch my TEDx talk entitled ‘Metamaterials matter: smart material of future‘).

I studied Physics at the University of Ferrara (Italy) from 2007 to 2012, and earned my PhD in Physics of Nanostructures and Advanced Materials from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) in 2016. As Predoctoral researcher in the Nanomagnetism Group at CIC nanoGUNE, I studied the optical properties of nanostructured magnetic materials, under the supervision of Prof. Paolo Vavassori. From 2017 to 2018, I was Research Associate at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa (Italy) in the Plasmon Nanotechnologies Unit led by Dr. Francesco De Angelis, working on plasmonic nanostructures to control light-matter interactions, in particular linear absorption and scattering of light, at the nanoscale. From 2019 to 2021, I was a Research Associate and a Junior Group Leader at the University of Luxembourg in the Ultrafast Phenomena in Condensed Matter Group led by Prof. Daniele Brida, leading a research team working on the FNR CORE Project ‘ULTRON‘ (2020-2022) and the European H2020 FET-Open Project ‘ProteinID‘ (2021-2024).

In December 2021, I moved to Umeå University (Sweden) to start my own research group, supported by a Starting Grant from the Swedish Research Council with the project ‘Nonthermal charge and spin dynamics in magnetoplasmonic nanomaterials‘, and the Horizon Europe EIC-Pathfinder Open Project ‘iSenseDNA‘ aiming at studying molecular structure by using advanced computational tools and ultrafast spectroscopy techniques together with international partners from Germany, Italy, France, Luxembourg and Sweden. In 2022, I became a Member of the Young Academy of Europe, an independent pan-European initiative of top young scientists for networking, scientific exchange and science policy. In 2023, I was appointed Wallenberg Academy Fellow by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and I was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the project ‘MagneticTWIST‘ from the European Research Council.