Principal Investigator

Alessandro Alabastri received his BSc (2007) and MSc (2009) in Engineering Physics from Politecnico di Milano, specializing in Nano-Optics and Photonics. In 2009 he completed his Master’s project at the Technical University of Denmark, working on the optical characterization of metamaterials. In 2014 he obtained a Ph.D. in Nanosciences from the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Genoa, working on computational modeling of plasmonic structures.

In 2015 he was Visiting Researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the Molecular Foundry. He joined Rice University in 2015 as Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2016) and NEWT Postdoctoral Leadership Fellow (2016-2018), working on theoretical nanophotonics and solar distillation devices. In 2018 he was appointed Texas Instruments Research Assistant Professor, and in July 2020, he started his group as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Rice University.

Dr. Alabastri is an expert in nanophotonics and computational modeling of photo-thermal interactions in complex nanostructures. He worked on several aspects of light-to-heat conversion, exploring the mechanisms to maximize heat dissipation in nanoparticle-based systems. He has realized predictive models of energy-conversion systems such as Photon Enhanced Thermionic Emission devices in collaboration with the European Space Agency and Nanophotonics Enabled Solar Membrane Distillation modules at Rice University.