Keynote: Prashant K. Jain, PhD, grew up in Bombay, where he completed his undergraduate education. He obtained his PhD working with M. A. El-Sayed at Georgia Tech, following which he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. After a Miller Fellowship at UC Berkeley, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Materials Research Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute. He is also an Alumni Research Scholar and an Affiliate Faculty Member of Physics and the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology (IQUIST). His research webpage can be found at https://nanogold.org.

Prof Jain’s lab specializes in nanoscale light–matter interactions and nanoscale-spatial-resolution chemical imaging. His noteworthy recent contributions are the co-discoveries of plasmon resonances in doped nanocrystals and plasmonic redox catalysis and photosynthesis. His collective work has been published in over 100 papers and cited over 27,000 times. He has been listed among Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics and Elsevier Scopus. Prashant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His work has been recognized, among other awards, by a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the ACS Kavli Emerging Leader in Chemistry award, the Beilby medal, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, and selection as MIT TR35 inventor.

1. George Schatz, PhD – George C. Schatz is Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Clarkson University and a Ph. D at Caltech. He was a postdoc at MIT, and has been at Northwestern since 1976. Schatz is a theoretician who studies the optical, structural and thermal properties of nanomaterials, including plasmonic nanoparticles, plasmonic metamaterials, DNA and peptide nanostructures, and carbon-based materials. He has contributed to theories of dynamical processes, including gas phase and gas/surface reactions, energy transfer processes, transport phenomena and photochemistry. Schatz has published four books and over 1100 papers. Schatz is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous awards, including the Debye and Langmuir Awards of the ACS, and the Bourke and Boys-Rahman Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Chemical Society and of the AAAS.

2. Robert W. Field, PhD –

3. Paul Weiss, PhD – Paul S. Weiss graduated from MIT with S.B. and S.M. degrees in chemistry in 1980 and from the University of California at Berkeley with a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1986. He is a nanoscientist and holds a UC Presidential Chair and is a distinguished professor of chemistry & biochemistry, bioengineering, and materials science & engineering at UCLA, where he was previously director of the California NanoSystems Institute. He also currently holds visiting appointments at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and several universities in Australia, China, India, and South Korea. He studies the ultimate limits of miniaturization, developing and applying new tools and methods for atomic-resolution and spectroscopic imaging and patterning of chemical functionality. He and his group apply these advances in other areas including neuroscience, microbiome studies, tissue engineering, and high-throughput gene editing. He led, coauthored, and published the technology roadmaps for the BRAIN Initiative and the U.S. Microbiome Initiative. He was the founding editor-in-chief of ACS Nano and served in that role from 2007–2021. He has won a number of awards in science, engineering, teaching, publishing, and communications. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, American Physical Society, American Vacuum Society, Canadian Academy of Engineering, IEEE, Materials Research Society, and an honorary fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society and Chemical Research Society of India.

4. Naomi Halas, PhD – To Appear