Giulio Cerullo - Biography#

Giulio Cerullo is a Full Professor with the Physics Department, Politecnico di Milano, where he leads the Ultrafast Optical Spectroscopy laboratory. During his thirty-year scientific career, he has made seminal experimental contributions to ultrafast optical science, spanning the development of ultrashort light sources and their application to the study of primary photoinduced processes in bio-molecules and solids. He pioneered optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) based on broadband phase matching, enabling the generation of few-optical-cycle sub-10-fs pulses across the visible, near-IR, and ultraviolet spectral ranges. In particular, the visible non-collinear OPA (NOPA) he introduced has become a standard tool in ultrafast spectroscopy worldwide. These advances enabled spectroscopic investigations of coherent dynamics on the experimentally challenging sub-100-fs timescale, leading to landmark studies of vision photochemistry, charge transfer in organic photovoltaics, charge carrier dynamics in superconductors, graphene and two-dimensional semiconductors. He also invented the TWINS birefringent interferometer, which enabled a robust and broadband implementation of two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy, now adopted by many laboratories. More recently, his work has opened new directions in nonlinear optics with two-dimensional materials, including atomically thin OPAs and phase-matched frequency conversion, as well as ultrafast spectroscopy with free-electron lasers. The scientific activity of Giulio Cerullo is documented by over 600 publications (among which 2 Nature, 3 Science, 13 Nature Photonics, 28 Nature Communications, 4 Nature Physics, 4 Nature Nanotechnology, 2 Nature Materials, 1 Nature Chemistry, 2 Science Advances). According to Scopus, these publications have received over 36000 citations, resulting in an H-index of 96.

Prof. Cerullo was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2012 (project STRATUS), an ERC Proof of Concept Grant in 2015 (project MISSION) and an ERC Synergy Grant in 2025 (as corresponding PI of the project CONCERT).He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, of the European Physical Society, of the Accademia dei Lincei and of the Italian Academy of Technology and past Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division of the European Physical Society. He has been General Chair of the conferences CLEO/Europe 2017, Ultrafast Phenomena 2018 and the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy 2024. He received in 2022 the Tartufari Prize of the Accademia dei Lincei and in 2023 the Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physical Society. Prof. Cerullo is co-inventor of 10 granted international patents in addition to 5 patent applications under evaluation. He has translated his scientific discoveries into technological innovations by co-founding two spin-off companies, NIREOS s.r.l. (https://www.nireos.com) and Cambridge Raman Imaging Ltd. (https://www.cambridgeramanimaging.com).