Personal information
Biography
Willem Vos obtained a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Amsterdam with highest honors (cum laude, top 5%) for his thesis “Phase behavior of simple systems at high pressure”. He received a prestigious Fellowship from the Carnegie Institution for Science (USA) where he discovered a novel class of "van der Waals compounds" at very high pressures (Nature 1992).
He then became one of the first to study photonic crystals at optical frequencies, niftily employing colloid physics and synchrotron X-ray methods. His team developed powerful “inverse opal” photonic crystals, reported in an influential Science paper ( >2400 Google citations). Since 2002 Vos is professor of Complex Photonic Systems (COPS) at the University of Twente; his team demonstrated the first ever control of spontaneous emission of light with photonic crystals (Nature 2004), and with a complete 3D photonic band gap (PRL 2011).
His COPS team pioneered optical wavefront shaping, a revolution in optics to “unscatter” scattered light, that leads to novel applications in imaging, microscopy and optical communication through opaque materials. Vos leads major multi-million-euro-consortia that closely collaborate with major high-tech industries and SMEs (with 30 BEUR annual turnover), to solve practical high-tech problems with advanced nanophotonics.
Vos was elected Fellow of the APS and of Optica (formerly: OSA), and was awarded the Snellius medal and the Descartes-Huygens prize by the French Academy of Sciences. He is guest professor at major institutions (in 2024: Langevin, ESPCI Paris Tech). His papers are on average cited >40x. Willem Vos takes much pride in his students who have become faculty members at leading institutes, or pursue careers in major industries as well as in non-profit organizations.