Thomas Pertsch is a professor of applied physics and one of the directors of the Abbe Center of Photonics (www.acp.uni-jena.de) at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where he leads the "Nano- and Quantum Optics Group” at the Institute of Applied Physics.
Currently, his research focus is on the generation and interaction of light with nanostructured matter, which includes e.g. metamaterials, photonic crystals and integrated quantum optical devices. In teaching, as the speaker of the Abbe School of Photonics (www.asp.uni-jena.de) and Fellow of the Max Planck School of Photonics, he is committed to the internationalization of research-related photonics education in Germany. He teaches mainly in the field of photonics and computational physics.