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Francesco Monticone

Director of Graduate Studies

Associate Professor

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Francesco Monticone
Francesco Monticone
Graduate Field Affiliation
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Biography

Francesco Monticone is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University and currently serves as the ECE Director of Graduate Studies (DGS). He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. (summa cum laude) degrees from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2009 and 2011, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2016. Monticone joined the faculty of Cornell University in 2017.

Monticone has authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications and delivered more than 80 invited talks and seminars. Over the past few years, he has received several research and teaching awards, including Cornell Engineering’s Research Excellence and Teaching Excellence Awards, the ONR and AFOSR Young Investigator Program Awards (YIPs), and the Leopold B. Felsen Award for Excellence in Electrodynamics. Monticone regularly serves on technical program committees and steering committees, and as session chair and session organizer, for the leading conferences in photonics, electromagnetics, and metamaterials. He previously served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation and currently serves as an Associate Editor of Optica, the flagship journals of the IEEE AP-S Society and the Optica Society, respectively. He also served as the Technical Program Committee Chair for Metamaterials 2025. Monticone is a member of the IEEE, the American Physical Society (APS), the Optical Society of America (Optica), The International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) and has been elected a full member of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI).

Research Interests

Dr. Monticone’s current research interests are in the areas of applied electromagnetics, metamaterials and metasurfaces, and theoretical/computational nanophotonics, with a focus on innovative and extreme aspects of wave interaction with engineered (meta)materials and the associated fundamental limits. His work is motivated both by fundamental scientific questions about wave-matter interactions and novel applications in a range of areas including information processing, communication, sensing and imaging, defense, and energy. Recent research topics range from passive radiative cooling and wireless energy transfer, to invisibility and stealth, one-way photonic transport, and metasurface-based flat optics.

  • Nanotechnology
  • Advanced Materials Processing
  • Nonlinear Dynamics
  • Optical Physics
  • Solid State, Electronics, Optoelectronics and MEMs
  • Physical Electronics, Devices, and Plasma Science

Teaching Interests

Monticone teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on intermediate and advanced electrodynamics, metamaterials, and nanophotonics. He has taught ECE 3030: Electromagnetic Fields and Waves for several years, and has established two new courses in the school’s curriculum:

  • ECE 4380/AEP 4450/ECE 5380: Electromagnetic and Optical Metamaterials
  • ECE 7300: Advanced Electrodynamics of Complex Media

Monticone received the Michael Tien’72 Sustained Excellence and Innovation in Engineering Education Award, the highest award for teaching in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering.

Select Publications

  • Y. Li and F. Monticone, “The spatial complexity of optical computing: toward space-efficient design,” Nature Communications, vol. 16, p. 8588, 2025. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-63453-8

  • F. Monticone, et al. “Nonlocality in photonic materials and metamaterials: Roadmap,” Optical Materials Express, vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 1544-1709, 2025. doi: 10.1364/OME.559374

  • T. T. Koutserimpas and F. Monticone, “Time-varying media, dispersion, and the principle of causality,” Optical Materials Express, vol. 14, pp. 1222-1236, 2024. doi: 10.1364/OME.515957

  • M. Ciabattoni, Z. Hayran, and F. Monticone, “Observation of broadband super-absorption of electromagnetic waves through space-time symmetry breaking,” Science Advances, vol. 11, no. 3, p. eads740, 2025. doi:10.1126/sciadv.ads7407

  • F. Monticone, “Toward Ultrathin Optics,” Science, vol. 379, no. 6627, pp. 30-31, Jan 2023. doi: 10.1126/science.adf2197

Francesco Monticone's Google Scholar

Select Awards and Honors

  • Research Excellence Award, Cornell University 2022
  • Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award 2022
  • Franco Strazzabosco Award for Research in Engineering, ISSNAF 2021
  • Michael Tien '72 Teaching Award, College of Engineering, Cornell University 2020
  • Leopold B. Felsen Award for Excellence in Electrodynamics, European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP) 2019
  • AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award (YIP), US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) 2018
  • Inaugural Margarida Jacome Dissertation Award, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas Austin 2017
  • Raj Mittra Travel Grant Award, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society 2017
  • Best Paper Award, Metamaterials Congress 2013
  • Three times selected as "Editor's Suggestion" in Physical Review Letters, American Physical Society

Education

  • B.S., Electronics Engineering, Politecnico di Torino 2009
  • M.S., Electronics Engineering, Politecnico di Torino 2011
  • Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin 2016

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