Emanuele Galiffi is an assistant professor in the Chandra Family Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

He received his degree in Physics in 2016 from Imperial College London, where he then received his PhD in 2021 within the condensed matter theory group, working on transformation optics, plasmonics and metamaterials in the group of Prof. Sir John Pendry. For his doctoral research, he was awarded the Johnson Matthew PhD Thesis Prize and the 2020 EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship.

Soon after, he was awarded the prestigious Junior Fellowship of the Simons Society of Fellows, with which he joined in 2021 the group of Prof. Andrea Alù at the Advanced Science Research Center of the City University of New York, where he focused on time-varying metamaterials and the realization and applications of temporal reflection, as well as polaritonic phenomena in electromagnetic and mechanical low-symmetry materials and metasurfaces. For his postdoctoral research he was awarded the 2025 SPIE Young Innovator Award.

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.