Valerio Pruneri

Institut de Ciències Fotòniques

Engineering Sciences

Valerio Pruneri is Corning Inc. Chair leading the Optoelectronics group at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO). Previously he worked for Avanex, Corning, Pirelli, and the University of Southampton. He has given about 70 invited talk and is inventor in about 40 patents. He has taken part in more than 40 technical or steering committees of international conferences. He serves on the QEOD board of the European Physical Society, the advisory board of ACREO AB Fiber Optic Centre, VLC Photonics, B-able seed funding capital and is technical advisor of Medlumics. He was awarded the Philip Morris Prize, Pirelli Fellowship, IBM Faculty award, Paul Ehrenfest award, Corning Inc. Professorship and Duran Farell Prize for technological research. His work has led to numerous industrial collaborations (e.g. Corning Inc., Carl Zeiss and HP) and the creation of two spin offs, quside (2017) and sixsenso-water (to be launched 2018).


Research interests

Valerio Pruneri leads the Optoelectronics group at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO). The group is working on ultrathin materials, nano-structured biomimetic surfaces, micro- and nano-engineered integrated and fibre optic devices for telecommunication, sensing, aerospace, energy and quantum cryptography. In particular the main driving is to carry out research which bridges the academic and the industrial worlds, by developing fundamental ideas which will have an impact on commercial products.

Selected publications

- Rodrigo D, Tittl A, Limaj O, Garcia de Abajo FJPruneri V & Altug H 2017, 'Double-layer graphene for enhanced tunable infrared plasmonics', Light-science & Applications, 6, e16277.

- Noyan MA, Guilhot D & Pruneri V 2017, ‘Functionalized transparent surfaces with enhanced self-cleaning against ink aerosol contamination’, Adv. Mater. Technol. 2, 1, 1600113.

- Mkhitaryan VK, Ghosh DS, Rudé M, Canet-Ferrer J, Maniyara RA, Gopalan KK & Pruneri V 2017, ‘Tunable complete optical absorption in multilayer structures including Ge2Sb2Te5 without lithographic patterns’, Adv. Opt. Mater. Volume 5, Issue 1.

- Perez JM, Jofre M, Martinez P, Yanez MA, Catalan V, Parker A, Veldhuis M & Pruneri V 2017, 'CMOS based image cytometry for detection of phytoplankton in ballast water', Biomedical Optics Express, 8, 2, 1240 - 1249.

- Gopalan KK, Janner D, Nanot S, Parret R, Lundeberg MB, Koppens FHL & Pruneri V 2017, ‘Mid-infrared pyroresistive graphene detector on LiNbO3', Advanced Optical Materials, 5, 1600723.


Selected research activities

- Founder of quside, a spin-off to develop and commercialise quantum random number generators, launched in 2017

- Corning Inc. Professor and head of Corning Surface Laborarory at ICFO, renewed in 2017

- 3 patent applications filed in 2017