Nader Engheta is the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BS degree from the University of Tehran, and his MSand PhD degrees from Caltech.

Engheta has been one of the original pioneers of the field of metamaterials, starting with his early work in the 1980s on complex and chiral media and then continuing with his numerous other transformative contributions in various areas of optics and electrodynamics, including his development of the fields of near-zero-index optics, optical nanocircuitry and analog computing using materials, plasmonic cloaking, and one-atom-thick metamaterials, just to name a few. His current research activities span a broad range of areas including photonics, metamaterials, nanoscale optics, microwaves, graphene optics, imaging and sensing inspired by eyes of animal species, microwave and optical antennas, and physics and engineering of fields and waves.

He has received several awards for his research including Optica's Max Born Award, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, SPIE Gold Medal, IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology, URSI Balthasar van der Pol Gold medal, IEEE Electromagnetics Award, William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship Award, among others. He is a Fellow of Optica, APS, IEEE, MRS, SPIE, AAAS, and URSI. He has received honorary doctoral degrees from Aalto University, University of Stuttgart and Ukraine’s National Technical University’s Kharkov Polytechnic Institute.