Giulio Cerullo is Full Professor of Physics at Politecnico di Milano and an internationally recognized scientist in ultrafast optical science. His research combines the development of advanced ultrafast light sources and spectroscopic techniques with their application to the investigation of fundamental photoinduced processes in molecules, nanostructures and condensed-matter systems.
He has made seminal contributions to the generation of few-optical-cycle pulses based on optical parametric amplifiers, pioneering the visible non-collinear optical parametric amplifier (NOPA), which has become a widely used tool in ultrafast spectroscopy. His group has extended these concepts from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared and developed coherent pulse-synthesis approaches towards sub-cycle optical waveforms. He has applied these technologies to investigate ultrafast processes ranging from the primary photochemical event of vision and charge transfer in organic photovoltaics to carrier dynamics in superconductors, graphene and two-dimensional materials. He also invented the TWINS birefringent interferometer, with applications in two-dimensional spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging.
Cerullo has published more than 600 scientific papers, with over 39,000 citations and an h-index of 97 (Scopus). His distinctions include an ERC Advanced Grant, the Luigi Tartufari International Prize, the European Physical Society Quantum Electronics Prize, a Miller Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and an ERC Synergy Grant. He is Fellow of Optica and the European Physical Society, Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the Italian Academy of Engineering, and a member of Academia Europaea.
He has held major leadership roles in international conferences, scientific journals and evaluation panels and has trained numerous researchers who have subsequently established successful independent careers. He is also strongly committed to technology transfer, with ten granted patents and two spin-off companies, NIREOS and Cambridge Raman Imaging.