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Alexandros Pitilakis
Hi! Welcome to my personal homepage =)

Intro

I'm a postdoc doing research and teaching/lecturing. My background is in electrical and computer engineering, with a specialization in telecommunications, and an expertise in high-frequency electromagnetic waves and light-matter interaction. Here's some profile links:








News

Research & Interests

My prime field of expertise is electromagnetics, theoretical and computational; specifically guided and radiated waves. My current research is focused in two (distinct) areas: graphene-enhanced nonlinear photonic devices and reconfigurable microwave metasurfaces. Here's a few of my latest published works:

For a full list of my publications, you can always check my Google Scholar profile.

My broader interests include silicon photonics, plasmonics, electro-optical phenomena, 2D material physics, metamaterials, liquid crystals, microstructured fibers, classical optics, optical fiber communications, mmWave & THz technology, antennas & propagation. Sounds a lot? Well, a researcher cannot always choose what to work on, and there's always an opportunity to learn new things :)

I have laboratory experience with optical fiber systems, free-space optics, antenna and RF/microwave technology & associated measurements.

Brief Resume

I was born in Thessaloniki, in 1982, and got my 5-years MSc diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) with a specialization in Telecommunications in 2005, from the engineering faculty of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). I hold another MSc degree, awarded from ENST/Telecom Paris in 2007, including a 6-month internship at Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia Bell Labs) optical transmission group, where I worked on dispersion managed heterogeneous optical fiber networks.

After my military service at the Hellenic Navy, I resumed research, now focused on integrated photonics, supervised by professor Emmanouil Kriezis (AUTH-ECE Photonics group) leading to a PhD granted in 2014 from ECE/AUTH. My doctorate thesis title is "Analysis, design and characterization of integrated photonic devices based on the hybrid conductor-dielectric-silicon technology" and you can find it here (in Greek, but you can still figure out the math and the figures!).

Since 2014, I've been working as a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with AUTH and FORTH (IESL and ICS), involved in a number of grants, scholarships and research projects, both national and European. The  Apart from R&D, I've served as an adjunct lecturer at ECE-AUTH (2016-2018) and also at the School of ECE of the University of Western Macedonia (2016-present), fully in charge of teaching senior year undergraduate courses: photonics, optics and antennas & propagation.

Computational Electromagnetics

Throughout my involvement with research, from 2004 to this day, I've developed scientific software and simulation tools primarily in MATLAB. It's something that I enjoy and also find useful; when both happen in the same project, so much the better! So, my main tools are various 1D and 2D full-vector mode-solvers and beam-propagation methods (BPM), implemented with analytical formulas (where possible, e.g., when a characteristic equation can be formulated) or finite difference/element methods (FDM/FEM), for complicated geometries. It's surprising how many things one can do with only these tools! Other, minor projects include coupled spatiotemporal ODEs (e.g. multi-pulse propagation in nonlinear waveguides coupled with carrier effects), ray/geometrical optics, and FDTD.

I'm presently setting up my [GitHub] page, to share these codes, as most of them can be handy tools for engineers in optics and photonics. Some of them are educational, but can easily be converted into R&D tools. Here's a list of what I've developed, with the ones already on GitHub marked in blue. If something from the list below interests you, don't hesitate to contact me. Maybe we can collaborate, on development and/or in applications.

Electromagnetics:

Optics:

I'm also experienced in several commercial computer-aided engineering tools (CST, HFSS, COMSOL, FlexPDE), and their scripting/interfacing with more research-friendly environments (MATLAB!).

Links

Here's some links relevant to me (profile pages, mostly).