Andrea
School & Work (with links to Wikipedia
)
I was born in Sacile (Pordenone, Italy) on the 13th of June 1977. After a short period in Udine, we moved to Switzerland (to Buchs, SG) where my sister Sara was born. In 1982 we moved again to Ticino, more precisely to Viganello, where I went to the Kindergarten and to the primary schools. In 1987 we moved to Cadro, where my parents still live. Want to see some pictures of my family? Click here! I attended the middle school in viganello, then the scientific high school in Lugano. After the matura I did not know what to choose between physics and engineering. I chose nuclear engineering at the politecnico di Milano: despite its "historical" name, it is a rather good compromise. I got some foundations of mechanical engineering, electronics, optics, chemistry, and lots of good physics and calculus classes. I really enjoyed my university years, especially the diploma work in the Soft Condensed Matter lab of prof. Piazza. But I hated the city: too many cars, too much concrete to do some sport.
In 2001 I went to Zurich for my PhD on optics, where I joined the Nonlinear Optics Laboratory del politecnico.
of the ETH. I worked on the realization of waveguides (sort of "pipes" for the light to be guided, like the
optical fibers) and other devices (like the microring resonator, see picture) in inorganic crystals.
The microring resonators are microscopic devices (the ring radius is typically one tenth of a millimiter) which can extract the light passing in a neighbouring waveguide and "store it"
if some conditions are met. So, some wavelengths can travel in the waveguide without being perturbed, whereas some others are extracted.
This is what you call a "bandpass" filter. Even better, since the material is electro-optic
we can decide
whether light is transmitted by applying an external voltage, so you can set on-off the signal (modulation).
I made a small about animation this.
Why do we need something like this? Such devices can be used in the telecom applications: phone calls or data transfer between computers (web, emails) are efficiently transferred over long
distances only if the signals travel as light pulses inside optical fibers. A modulator is therefore needed to translate the electronic signal (which is generated inside the phone or the computer) into an optical one.
At the beginning of 2007 I finished my PhD by (finally!) demonstrating a prototype of a modulator based on a microring resonator in lithium niobate. Want to read more? Have a look at my thesis and at my papers on this page.
After a short period at Rolic (a small company located close to Basel working on liquid crystals), I've started worked at Oclaro. Oclaro (formerly known as Bookham) is a leading company in the field of semiconductor lasers. I've worked in the R&D department of the Zurich site, for the development of high power laser diodes.
Since June 2010 I've worked as a Simulation Engineer in the Research and Technology Department of the Casale Group, a chemical engineering company designing and developing worldwide ammonia, urea and methanol plants.
Free time
I always liked school, but I also had other passions. As a child I loved maps and geography (actually I still do it). I used to play the clarinet for many years and I've always done some sports, even though I was never that skilled in any of them to get nice results. I love endurance sports: running and biking. I have a race bike since 1994 (it's my third one, a
Spezzotto)like the other two). I bike all the year long, if the weather is not too bad. I do not ride very long distances, but since I'm lightweight I give my best on the steepest ascents. I also run, but not too often, since otherwise my knees start complaining...
I'm a great mountain lover. I've always been since I was a child. Every year I go with Barbara hiking around: in Switerland and in Italy, especially in the Dolomiti. Our starting point is usually the flat in Santa Fosca di Selva di Cadore (Belluno, Italy). Somewhen I think it would be great to see the Patagonian mountains, but I don't know when we will do it!
Since some years I've started playing around in the kitchen. I've learned from my granma Maria how to cook cakes, cookies and other desserts. I'm learning, and my recipe list is getting longer: it might even appear on the website some day...