Lecture: 'Strong light matter interaction and new states of matter'

Angel Rubio, PhD in Physics in 1991 from the University of Valladolid (UVA), spent time at several well-known universities in USA, Germany, UK, Spain and France during his PhD studies. He also worked as a post-doctoral researcher at University of California at Berkeley. Between 1994 and 2001 he was an Associate Professor at the UVA. Diverse Professorships at the École Polytechnique Paris-Saclay, the Freie Universität Berlin and the Université de Montpellier followed. After being appointed with a Full Professorship in 2001, he moved to San Sebastián and started at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) as Chair of Condensed Matter Physics and director of the Nano-Bio Spectroscopy Group. Presently he is the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter and the director of its theory department. He is a distinguished professor of physics at the University of the Basque Country and a professor of physics at the University of Hamburg. He is one of the founders of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility and the originator of the widely used ab initio open-source project Octopus.

His research interests are rooted to the modeling and theory of electronic and structural properties of condensed matter as well as to the development of new theoretical tools to investigate the electronic response of materials, nanostructures, biomolecules and hybrid materials to external electromagnetic fields. Rubio is acknowledged as Pioneer and leader in the field of first-principles study of materials with many seminal contributions to electronic structure theory and theoretical materials science: including topical areas as graphene, carbon and BCN nanostructures, molecular junctions, complex and biological materials. Noteworthy is the predictive nature of his work, which often provided detailed quantitative predictions subsequently verified experimentally. His research activity is internationally recognized and he has been awarded with numerous honors and prizes, including the 2018 Max Born Medal and Prize, the 2016 Medal of the Spanish Royal Physical Society, the 2014 Premio Rey Jaime I for basic research, the 2006 DuPont Prize in nanotechnology, the 2005 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation, and two European Research Council advanced grants, in 2011 and 2016. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Academia Europea, and a foreign associate member of the National Academy of Sciences.