The PhD defence took place at UvA’s historic Agnietenkapel on June 11, 2026.

We have an opening for an exciting PhD position: combining nanophotonic metasurfaces with mechanical metamaterials to study reconfigurable wavefront shaping! Find the full project description on the UvA website.

Our latest publication is now available in Nano Letters! We show how electrically addressable monolayers of WS2, encapsulated in an hBN metasurface offer full-2-pi phase control, enabling complex amplitude modulation and beam steering. Congratulations to first author Tom, great work! Thanks to Mark Brongersma for the fun collaboration!.

Check out our most recent publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C! Sodium sulfate is a promising material platform for thermal energy storage, where the giant latent heat of a phase transition can be leveraged to temporarily store thermal energy. However, the desired phase (mirabilite, hosting 10 water molecules) is hindered by the undesired formation of the metastable heptahydrate. In this work, we systematically map the nucleation and dissolution of both phases and discover that mirabilite nucleates very close to the formation temperature of ice, and cannot be stimulated via heterogeneous nucleation sites. This work highlights the need to gain control over the controlled nucleation of this salt to capitalise on its major potential for thermal energy storage.

Another exciting new publication from our group, which is now available in Light: Science & Applications!
In this work, we combine the uniquely tunable material properties of monolayer 2D semiconductors with the strong light-matter interaction of optical metasurfaces to demonstrate electrically tunable optical modulation.

Check out our latest publication in ACS Photonics! Inspired by kirigami, we design a nanopatterned silicon membrane that supports a strong optical resonance which can be tuned over a large spectral range through simple mechanical stretching. This novel structure combines the best of two worlds into a multifunctional metastructure: the internal rotations and reconfigurations of mechanical metamaterials with the optical resonances of photonic metasurfaces.

Our new article in Advanced Optical Materials just became available online! Here, we demonstrate how binary blazed gratings patterned in a monolayer 2D semiconductor enable electrically selective beam steering, despite the lack of propagation phase.