Mark Brongersma is a Professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Applied Physics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He leads a research team of ten students and four postdocs. Their research is directed towards the development and physical analysis of new materials and structures that find use in nanoscale electronic and photonic devices. He studied physics at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. from the FOM Institute in Amsterdam in 1998. There he investigated the optical properties of light-emitting silicon nanostructures.

From 1998-2001, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. During this time, he worked on light manipulation with metallic nanostructures below the free space diffraction limit. There, he coined the term “plasmonics” for a new device technology that exploits the unique optical properties of nanoscale metallic structures to route and manipulate light at the nanoscale.

He has authored\co-authored over 175 publications, including papers in Science, Nature Photonics, Nature Materials, and Nature Nanotechnology. He also holds a number of patents in the area of Si microphotonics and plasmonics. He is a co-founder of Rolith, a company that has developed a range of products that require large-area, low-cost, high-throughput nanostructuring.

Brongersma was the Chair of the Gordon Conference on Plasmonics in 2014. He received a National Science Foundation Career Award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, the International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (Physics) for his work on plasmonics, and is a Fellow of The Optical Society, SPIE, and the American Physical Society.