Emanuele Galiffi, assistant professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been named the recipient of the 2026 Santimay Basu Prize from Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale (URSI). The award was given for “ contributions to the field of time-varying electromagnetic metamaterials, in particular macroscopic and microscopic theories. Demonstration and early applications of time-reflection and space-time modulation for energy and frequency manipulation."
The Prize will be awarded during the Opening Ceremony of the URSI General Assembly and Scientific Symposium in Krakow, Poland, on August 16, 2026.
The Santimay Basu prize is presented to a young scientist who has made an outstanding contribution to research that furthers the understanding of radio-wave propagation in random media and its application for the benefit of society.
The award is named for Dr. Santimay Basu, born in India in 1933, who was the internationally recognized expert in the area of ionospheric scintillation, having made cutting edge research contributions to every aspect of the field encompassing diverse natural irregularity formation processes at high-, mid- and low latitudes, as well as artificial turbulence generation through high-power high frequency (HF) radio wave interactions and high-altitude chemical releases.
Emanuele Galiffi is an assistant professor and a Fellow of Silicon Laboratories Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering in the Chandra Family Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.
His group focuses on theoretical research in ultrafast wave phenomena in active and time-varying materials, ranging from the multiscale modelling of nonequilibrium phenomena under extreme optical pumping to macroscopic electromagnetics, polaritonics and quantum electrodynamics in time-varying systems as well as their applications to wave amplification, frequency conversion and analog computation. He also works on polaritons and mechanical waves in extremely low-symmetry materials and metasurfaces.
