Valentina Emiliani - Biography#
Valentina Emiliani obtained her PhD in Physics (University ‘La Sapienza’ (Rome, Italy) in 1997, working on the investigation of tunneling effect in quantum wells by ultrafast spectroscopy. She then joined, as a post doc, the group of Prof. Thomas Elsaesser (Max Born Institute, Berlin), to investigate carrier transport in quantum wires by low temperature scanning near field optical microscopy (SNOM). It was a very challenging project aiming at measuring the spectral properties of quantum structures of nanometric dimensions. Following the success of her experiments in Berlin, she was offered a position at the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS), a major research laboratory associated with the University of Florence in Italy. She joined LENS in 2000 to lead the research group: ‘High resolution microscopy’, focused on the investigation of light propagation in disordered structure by SNOM. In 2002 she moved to Paris at the Institute Jacques Monod to start a new interdisciplinary activity at the interface between physics and biology. Her interest was to study the role of mechanical forces on the establishment of cell polarity by optical tweezers. In 2004 she was recruited at the CNRS, to begin her project on optical control of neuronal activities with light. This project was awarded in 2005 by a European Young Investigator grant (EURYI 2005). Thanks to this grant she could move in the neurophysiology and new microscopy Laboratory at the University Paris Descartes where she formed the “Wave front engineering microscopy” group. She became research director in 2011 and in 2014, she formed the Neurophotonics laboratory at Paris Descartes University that she directed since December 2018. In January, she moved the wave front engineering microscopy group at the Vision Institut in Paris where she has also taken the head of the photonics department. She is co-author of more than 70 publications in international journals and gave more than 80 invited seminars. In 2015 she has been awarded with the Prix “Coups d’élan pour la recherche française” from the Bettencourt-Shueller foundation and in 2017 she has been awarded with the Axa Chair “Investigation of visual circuits by optical wave front shaping “.
Full-length CV
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