The 28th of April was my last official day at the Leibniz Institute for Photonic Technology (IPHT). I consider myself very lucky to have been a part of this incredible group (shown nostalgically in the black-and-white photograph above) led by Prof. Markus A. Schmidt, covering numerous and diverse fields such as plasmonics, non-linear optics, hybrid photonics, metasurfaces and metamaterials, bio-photonics and sensing (and more!) – all within the optical fiber platform. I thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which sponsored my fellowship and made me feel at home in Germany from the get-go.

I had a very productive and fun two and a half years, making many friends and connections not only inside IPHT, but also in the neighboring Abbe Center of Photonics and the Fraunhofer Institute, as well as the Max Planck Institutes and Center for Molecular Biomedicine – what an environment! Anyone who visits Jena is immediately impressed by the quality of the infrastructure within the City of Light – and I mean that in terms of human, scientific, and educational resources. Of particular note is the Masters in Photonics Program at the Abbe School of Photonics (at which I had the pleasure of lecturing, overseeing student seminars, and superviseing Masters students), which I believe currently provides the best-value English-language photonics education in the world.

Looking back at my two years at IPHT, I produced four first-author publications (with a few more on the way!), contributing four more as co-author, while still contributing to papers with colleagues in Sydney and Freiburg. Fortunately, the experience gained by the group through my contributions has not been lost, and I am confident that the students I recruited and trained will continue with great success in the years to come!

I’ll be officially starting on June 1st at the Australian Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, under the University of Sydney Fellowship scheme working on hybrid nonlinear plasmonics with Stefano Palomba and Martijn de Sterke. They’ve been coming up with breakthrough developments and I’m very keen to get started. I learned a lot over the past two years at IPHT, giving me numerous ideas that I intend to pursue in my next position – and beyond.

Thank you IPHT and everyone in Jena – this is my Auf Wiedersehen. I’ll be in touch!