Constantinos (Costas) Valagiannopoulos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics of Nazarbayev University (NU), Kazakhstan since August 2015, when he joined NU as an Assistant Professor. He leads the Metamaterials Modeling and Design Group at NU, performing research on the forward and inverse design of photonic devices manipulating the light as well as on the translation of electromagnetic concepts into quantum systems. He has authored or coauthored more than 100 works published at international refereed scientific journals (Scopus Q1) and presented numerous reports in scientific conferences. He is currently participating as Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI in the successful execution of national and international research grants of total annual budget larger than 600K USD.

He obtained his Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1999-2004) with honors and pursued his PhD (2004-2009) in Electromagnetic Theory at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. He then (2010-2014) joined Aalto University, Finland as a member of Theoretical and Applied Electromagnetics of Complex Media group (AaltoReference, Advisor: Sergei Tretyakov), while later he was with the Metamaterials and Plasmonics Laboratory (AustinReference, Advisor: Andrea Alu) to University of Texas at Austin, USA (2014-2015). During the last two years (2015-2017), he has done internships to Harvard University (HarvardReference) and University of Southampton (SouthamptonReference).

In April 2018, he was elected OSA Senior Member, in May 2017 and 2018 received OSA’s reviewer recognition, in April 2016 was elevated to IEEE Senior Member, while in December of 2015 he received the Journal of Optics Research Excellence Award 2015. In May of 2008 he received the International Chorafas Award and the competitive Thomaides Award for the Best Doctoral Thesis.  He was a Guest Editor for MDPI Photonics for the special issueincluding selected papers presented at 2019 Metamaterials Congress. He has won a Newton Al-Farabi Researcher Links Travel Grant for 2017 and he is the winner of the 2020 NU Teaching Award for Integrating Research and Teaching.