Dr. Michelle Lynn Povinelli is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics and Astronomy at the University Southern California. She is a Fellow of the OSA and the SPIE. She is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the TR35 Award for innovators under age 35 from MIT’s Technology Review magazine. She received a BA from the University of Chicago, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from MIT, all in Physics. She was a postdoctoral researcher in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where she won a L’Oréal For Women in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has co-authored more than seventy-five journal articles, three book chapters, and three US Patents.

Dr. Povinelli’s research interest is nanophotonics, the study of how light interacts with nano- and microscale structures. Her group studies nanophotonic structures such as photonic crystals, microresonators, and nanowires for applications in optical communications, energy, and biology. Dr. Povinelli uses both theoretical and experimental techniques to study the basic science of nanophotonic materials, design novel devices, and optimize them for various applications.