Manukumara Manjappa received his Integrated M.Sc in physics from the University of Mysore, India in 2009 and his M.S. (Research) from the National University of Singapore in 2013. He joined Prof. Ranjan Singh’s lab at NTU Singapore, where he got his Ph.D. degree for work on reconfigurable terahertz devices in 2019. He did his initial postdoctoral work from 2019-2021 at the center for Disruptive Photonic Technologies (CDPT), NTU Singapore under the supervision of Prof. Ranjan Singh and Prof. Nikolay Zheludev. He later joined Prof. Junichiro Kono’s lab at Rice University, USA as a postdoctoral research associate from 2021-2022, where he worked on quantum photonics experiments in carbon nanotubes. He joined the Instrumentation and Applied Physics department as an Assistant Professor in Nov. 2022. His research interests include ultrafast spectroscopy, ultrastrong polaritonics, cavity quantum materials, metamaterials, THz spintronics, and quantum photonics.CM Chandrashekar is a graduate of National Collage (Jayanagar), Bangalore University (B.Sc), and after graduation, he moved to the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 2002. At Oxford, he worked on Experimental Bose-Einstein condensates for slightly over two years and moved to the Institute for Quantum Computing / Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada (University of Waterloo). At Waterloo, he worked on theoretical problems in the field of quantum information theory and quantum computation and obtained a Ph.D. in the year 2009. After completing his postdoctoral tenure in Ireland and at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan he moved to The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai as a faculty member (2015 – ). He is also the recipient of the Ramanujan Fellowship (2015) and an affiliate member at the Institute for Quantum Computing, Canada. Starting from early 2021 he has set up a quantum optics and quantum information processing laboratory at dept. of IAP and working on both, theoretical and experimental problems in the field of quantum information processing and quantum computation. He is also interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics.Ambarish Ghosh is an Indian scientist, a faculty member at the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE), Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is also an associate faculty at the Department of Physics. He is known for his work on nanorobots, active matter physics, plasmonics, metamaterials and electron bubbles in liquid helium. Ambarish received the Young Career Award in Nano Science and Technology for 2017 from DST Nanomission, India. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for his contributions to physical sciences in 2018. He received the Prof. Ramakrishna Rao Chair Professorship from 2017–2020. He was elected as Fellow of INAE (Indian National Academy of Engineering) in 2020, Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS) in 2023, received P. K. Iyengar Memorial Award for Excellence in Experimental Physics 2022, and the Lam Research Unlock Idea Award in 2022.Tapajyoti Das Gupta obtained his B.Sc. and Btech in Physics and Radiophysics respectively from the University of Calcutta in 2006 and 2009. He then moved to France where he received his MSc in nanoscience from École Polytechnique (l’X) in 2012 and PhD in Condensed Matter Physics lab (PMC) from the same institute in 2015 under Prof. Thierry GACOIN and Alistair ROWE. He then joined Prof. Fabien Sorin’s Fiber Optics and Photonics Devices (FIMAP) lab in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) during 2015 December-2019 November. He also served in the Electrical Engineering department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) for five months from January 2020 to May 2020, before joining the Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics in July 2020. His research interest includes dynamic metasurfaces, optical instrumentation and soft robotics.
