Congratulations to FLEET’s Maciej Pieczarka, who has been awarded the START award for young Polish scientists by the Foundation for Polish Science.
Dr Pieczarka is an experimental physicist working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National University in Prof Elena Ostrovskaya’s group.
Within FLEET, Maciej studies exciton-polariton condensates, focusing on dynamical condensation and phase transitions of exciton-polariton fluids created in semiconductor microcavities. He also investigates excitations such as vortices and solitons in nonlinear fluids of light.
Maciej’s background in novel optoelectronic materials and devices is particularly useful in FLEET’s study of optimisation of microcavities containing 2D materials for room-temperature operation of polariton lasers.
Maciej works closely with FLEET Partner Investigator Professor Grzegorz Sęk at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST), seeking high-temperature operation of exciton-polariton lasers based on AlGaAs compounds.
Professor Sęk leads research at WUST in novel epitaxial nanostructures in nanophotonics, new semiconducting systems in optoelectronics and sensing, many-particle physics, dynamical properties and light-matter coupling in solids, exciton-polaritons and their condensation, and 2D materials.
FLEET partner organisation Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST) is Poland’s top-ranked new-technology university, excelling in computer science, electronics and materials science.
Each year the Foundation for Polish Science awards scholarships in the highly competitive START program to the 100 most talented young Polish scientists, who each receive an annual scholarship of 28,000 zł. Over the 28 years of the program, more than 3,100 outstanding researchers have received prestigious scholarships.