Alexander Szameit earned his PhD from Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, Germany, in 2007. Since 2016, he has been Professor for Experimental Solid State Physics at the University of Rostock, Germany. Previously, he was a junior professor at the Institute of Applied Physics at Friedrich Schiller University. He was awarded the 2014 Adolph Lomb Award “for groundbreaking contributions to linear and nonlinear light evolution in photonic lattices, and photonic simulations of quantum, solid state, and relativistic phenomena.”