Romolo Savo is a researcher at CREF and associate researcher at the Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi ISC–CNR in Rome. His research concerns complex photonic materials, from their fabrication to the experimental optical investigation and the development of numerical models.
He investigates the fundamental laws regulating optical transport and nonlinear coherent phenomena in complex photonic structures, mainly characterized by photonic disorder.
He is also interested in the engineering of photonic complexity, starting from elementary nanophotonic elements (e.g. nanoparticles) by using bottom-up fabrication techniques to develop photonic devices that are both efficient and environmentally sustainable.
He is a permanent member of the CREF’s Computational Photonics laboratory, where he currently investigates using complex photonic materials as hardware platforms for machine learning and neuromorphic optical computing.
In 2023 he was awarded the Young Researchers -MSCA grant, founded
by European Union (Next Generation EU) and by the national PNRR for his project Comp-SECOONDO focused on the research he carries on at CREF.
He completed his education at the University of Naples “Federico II” (MS in Physics ). He obtained his Ph.D. at the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS) of the University of Florence. He has been a postdoc researcher at the Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris and at ETH in Zurich, where he was awarded a
Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship and was later appointed as Lecturer. His publication record comprises contributions to the most prestigious scientific journals, such as Science, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications and Physical Review Letters. He co-authored 18 peer-reviewed articles and contributed to more
than 30 conferences.
He is frequently invited to give seminars at international conferences and
academic institutions.
He is a member of the “Spotlight in Optics” editorial panel from OPTICA (former OSA) and a referee for several international journals in physics and optics.
He has an hindex of 11 and more than 470 citations (source Google Scholar).