Rate My Professor Miro Erkintalo

Professor Miro Erkintalo is Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Auckland and a professor in the Faculty of Science. Born and raised in Pori, Finland, he earned a B.Sc. in March 2009, an M.Sc. in November 2009, and a D.Sc. in physics in January 2012, all from Tampere University of Technology. He joined the University of Auckland as a postdoctoral fellow in 2012, became a Lecturer in the Department of Physics in 2014, Senior Lecturer in February 2017, Associate Professor in February 2021, and subsequently Professor. He is also a principal investigator at the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies.

Erkintalo specialises in ultrafast and nonlinear optics, with particular emphasis on guided-wave and resonator geometries, mode-locked fiber lasers, nonlinear fiber optics, supercontinuum generation, microresonator frequency combs, and temporal cavity solitons. His work explores fundamental interactions of strong laser light with matter and applications in optical communications, microscopy, and micro-machining. He received a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2015 and Marsden Fund grants, the Hamilton Award from the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2016 for early-career research excellence in nonlinear optics and laser physics, and the Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize in 2020. Key publications include papers in Optics Letters (2013), Nature Photonics (2014), Physics Reports (2018), Physical Review Letters (2019), and Micromachines (2020). He has contributed to the development of theoretical models for optical frequency combs and inexpensive ultrashort pulsed lasers.