Invited Speakers

 

    

 Dr. Giovanni Volpe 

Giovanni Volpe earned his PhD in 2008 from ICFO – the Institute of Photonic Sciences (Barcelona, Spain) for his work on optical trapping done in the group of late Prof. Dmitri Petrov. Later, as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Clemens Bechinger at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Stuttgart, Germany), Dr Volpe shifted his research focus towards soft matter, obtaining far-reaching results in the development of a new class of light-activated artificial microswimmers and in the study of Brownian motion in diffusion gradients. From 2012 till 2016, Dr Volpe was Assistant Professor at Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey). From 2016, Dr Volpe is Associate Professor in the Physics Department of the University of Gothenburg (Gothenburg, Sweden), where he leads an 8-person-strong research group with an externally-funded, ambitious and interdisciplinary research program that combines soft condensed matter, nanotechnology and photonics.

 

 

Dr. Irina Filonova

Dr. Irina Filonova is an academic developer at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa, Japan. She helps STEM researchers from over 40 countries to find academic and non-academic jobs across the globe.  Her day-to-day job is never boring as she gets to work with an incredibly diverse international population and face peculiar challenges of cross-cultural communication. Dr. Filonova enjoys moving to new places and experience difference cultures not as a tourist but as a resident. Thus, Japan is the 3rd country Dr. Filonova has lived and worked and, by far, not the last one.

In addition to her curious cultural experiences, Dr. Filonova has a non-conventional professional background for a scientist. Born in Russia, she studied literature and linguistic until she moved to the US in search for her true self. While the search wasn’t quite fruitful, it brought her to FL where she decided to pick up her education and completed B.S. in Biology and Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (Neuroscience) form the Medical School, University of South Florida. After 3-year postdoc at UT Southwestern, Dallas, TX, she found herself on a subtropical island of Okinawa where she is still exploring multiple professional identities and passionately supporting women in STEM. https://www.linkedin.com/in/irinafilonova/