Alù, an engineer and photonics researcher, is best known for his breakthroughs in invisibility cloaking, or making objects transparent to incoming microwave signals. He was previously the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor #3 in the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. He was also a member of the Cockrell School’s Wireless Networking and Communications Group and the head of the Metamaterials and Plasmonic Research Laboratory. He holds more than a dozen patents and patent applications and has co-authored more than 500 contributions to scientific literature. He is a recent recipient of the Alan T. Waterman Award (2015) from the National Science Foundation — one of the top prizes for scientists and engineers in the United States.

Alù begins his Graduate Center appointment in early 2018.