Fiorenzo Omenetto

Fiorenzo (Fio) G. Omenetto is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and leads the laboratory for Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics and Biophotonics at Tufts University and also holds an appointment in the Department of Physics. His research addresses multiple themes ranging from optics, nanostructured materials (such as photonic crystals and photonic crystal fibers), nanofabrication, and biopolymer based photonics. He has published over 100 papers and peer-reviewed contributions across these various disciplines.

Since moving to Tufts at the end of 2005, he has proposed and pioneered (with David Kaplan) the use of silk as a material platform for photonics, optoelectronics and high-technology applications, is co-inventor on over fifty disclosures (published and unpublished) on the subject and is actively investigating novel applications that rely on this technology base. Applications of this material platform have recently been featured in MIT’s Technology Review magazine as one of its 2010 "top ten technologies likely to change the world." Professor Omenetto was formerly a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining Tufts, and was recently named one of the top fifty people in tech by Fortune Magazine.

Profile photograph by Nico and Stella Omenetto.