Fiorenzo Omenetto

Athlete, Brainstormer, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Explorer, Idea generator, Inventor, Musician, Parent, Photographer

Fiorenzo (Fio) Omenetto is the Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts University and a Professor in the Biomedical Engineering Dept and in the Department of Physics. His research interests cover optics, nanostructured materials (such as photonic crystals and photonic crystal fibers), nanofabrication, and biopolymer-based photonics. Since moving to Tufts at the end of 2005, he has proposed, pioneered, and fallen in love -because of a colleague down the hall and through no fault of his own- with the use of silk as a material platform for photonics, optoelectronics and high-technology applications. He is actively investigating novel applications that rely on this technology base... from delivering vaccines to remote areas without the need for refrigeration or reconstitution, to making compostable electronics, to replacing plastics. He was named one of the top-50 people in tech by Fortune magazine in a class of 50 featuring Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Shigeru Miyamoto among others. Fio was formerly a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.

bioinspired materials, Nonlinear optics, Optics and photonics, silk, Structural color