Luca Tartara

Luca Tartara was born in Broni (PV) on April 6, 1974. He received his laurea degree with honors in Electronics from the Faculty of Engineering, Università degli Studi di Pavia in 1999 defending a thesis about frequency conversion of light pulses in a waveguide. He was then called up to the Presidency of the Council of the Ministers and worked in the group in charge of the organization of the main events of the Holy Jubilee of the Year 2000. Afterwards he joined back Università degli Studi di Pavia to pursue a PhD in Electronics and Computer Engineering. His PhD thesis dealt with the experimental investigation of the propagation of ultrashort pulses in conventional and microstructured optical fibers. During his PhD studies he also study periods at Spectra Physics Lasers, Mountain View, U.S.A., and at the Laser Research Center at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania. After receiving his PhD he got a grant from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics and joined the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur to set-up a novel picosecond laser system to be subsequently employed for the investigation of material and devices for photonics. In 2005 he was appointed as Assistant Professor with the Department of Electronics, now Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at Università degli Studi di Pavia, where he is now an Associate Professor of Physics. He is in charge of Femtolab, a research laboratory devoted to nonlinear photonics. His scientific activity has spread over several fields of ultrafast nonlinear optics and laser physics, from the generation and characterization of ultrashort pulses to the investigation of their properties and applications in light-matter interaction and microscopy. The results obtained have led to tens of papers on peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, several of them being invited contributions, and a book chapter. His teaching activity has developed mostly in courses of physics for first-year students at the Faculty of Engineering. Since the academic year 2012/13 he has also been teaching “Nonlinear Optics” to students attending the first year of the master degree in Electronics Engineering. Finally he has been a member of the organizing committee of “Laserfest – Un’idea brillante” and “Ondivaghiamo”, events devoted to scientific divulgation having drawn thousands of visitors.