Professor Xiao-Cong (Larry) Yuan of Shenzhen University and the Zhejiang Lab, and Professor Anatoly Zayats of King’s College London are the founding co-editors-in-chief of the high-impact journal Advanced Photonics. Established in 2019, Advanced Photonics publishes innovative research in every important area of optics and photonics, spanning both fundamental and applied research. Since its launch, the journal has achieved an Impact Factor of 20.6 and a CiteScore of 22.7, placing it among the most highly cited journals in the optics and photonics field. This level of success, in no small part, reflects the combined efforts of Yuan and Zayats.
Zayats, an SPIE Fellow Member, is a professor of physics at King’s College London. He leads the university’s Photonics & Nanotechnology Group and is co-director of the university’s Net Zero Centre. His research focus lies in nanophotonics and plasmonics; metamaterials and metasurfaces’ electromagnetic field topology and optical spin-orbit coupling effects; nonlinear and ultrafast optics and spectroscopy; hot-electrons and associated photochemistry; near-field optics and scanning probe microscopy; and optical properties of surfaces, thin films, semiconductors and low-dimensional structures. In addition to his other roles, he is a co-director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology, and the London Institute for Advanced Light Technologies.
Yuan is a professor at Shenzhen University and also serves as the director of the university’s Nanophotonics Research Center, a center which he established. His particular areas of research include optical communication, photoacoustic microscopy, optical trapping, plasmonics, structured light, nanophotonics, and optical vortices. He is a Fellow of both the Chinese Optical Society and SPIE.
The group of SPIE Board of Directors members that nominated Yuan and Zayats for this prestigious award includes M. Cather Simpson of the University of Auckland; Miles Padgett of the University of Glasgow; Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop of the University of Queensland; and Kyle Myers of Puente Solutions LLC.
“Working with each other and with SPIE staff, Larry and Anatoly have achieved what many have failed to do and what many have thought impossible,” note the collective nominators. “Usually a high-impact journal takes years to establish. In a small number of years, Larry and Anatoly have established an SPIE journal to rival the highest-profile journals in the field, with journal-level publication metrics surpassing those published by other cognate societies. Together, Larry and Anatoly represent the difference that SPIE leadership can make to both the Society and the wider photonics community.”
