Dr Airán Ródenas Seguí

Airán Ródenas Seguí (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, 1980) is presently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Heriot Watt University. He graduated with a Ph.D in Physics in December 2009 from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) with a thesis on ultrafast laser processing of crystalline materials for photonic applications. His PhD thesis mainly focused on understanding the physical changes which take place at the micro and nanoscale inside a crystal as a result of tightly focusing pulsed laser irradiation, as well as on developing of novel photonic devices such as laser channel waveguides or photonic crystal three-dimensional lattices.

In February 2010 he joined the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot Watt University (Edinburgh, UK) as a postdoctoral research associate funded by a UK EPSRC project, where he continued his research on the femtosecond laser microfabrication and characterization of novel photonic devices in glasses and crystals and focusing on novel mid-IR chalcogenide waveguides. In July 2010 he was awarded a Spanish postdoctoral research fellowship with a project on 3D photonic band-gap crystals and solid-state microphotonics to be developed at Heriot Watt University and in coordination with the Center for Micro-Photonics (CMP) of Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne, Australia).

Along with his research on the laser fabrication of photonic band-gap structures he currently also works on other developments such as: mid-infrared photonics for astrophotonics, novel optofluidics, and integrated waveguide lasers. His major –published- achievements in 2 years as a postdoctoral researcher in UK (2010-2012) include the first demonstration of mid-infrared waveguiding (up to 11 µm wavelengths) in a direct laser written waveguide, and the subsequent demonstration of the first three-dimensional mid-infrared beam combiners for astronomical applications (in collaboration with R. R. Thomson and the Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) in France).