Andrea Alù and Team Awarded ERC Synergy Grant to Revolutionize Wireless Communications
Photo credits to: ASRC Photonics Initiative Aims at Creating a New Age of Wireless Communication
NewFoS celebrates Professor Andrea Alù, Distinguished and Einstein Professor of Physics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and director of the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative, for being awarded a highly competitive $11.44 million European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant.
The grant supports an international collaboration—including teams from Technische Universität Berlin, CNRS Paris, and ETH Zurich—to rethink how wireless systems transmit and process data. By leveraging metasurfaces, ultra-thin materials engineered to manipulate radio waves, the team aims to perform signal processing directly in the wave domain. This approach could make future wireless networks faster, more adaptable, and billions of times more energy-efficient than today’s technology.
“This collaboration allows us to merge wave physics, information theory, and advanced computation,” said Alù. “It’s an extraordinary opportunity to design communication systems from the ground up—powerful, efficient, and sustainable.”
The WePhICom project (Waves, Physics, Information, and Computation) will develop theoretical foundations, hardware demonstrators, and algorithms to bring this vision to life, paving the way for greener, smarter connectivity for 6G networks, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and global sensing systems.
👏 Congratulations to Andrea Alù and the international team for pushing the boundaries of wireless technology and sustainable innovation!
More information, here.