SANLI FAEZ, ALUMNUS OF NANOTECHNOLOGY
"After obtaining my Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Sharif University of Technology (Iran), it was professor Wilfred van der Wiel who introduced me to the relatively new Nanotechnology programme here at the University of Twente.
What appealed to me was the style of the courses. They were very different from my previous experience of exercise-intensive classical studies. The multidisciplinary nature of the Nanotechnology courses were encouraging me to think more of working in a big enterprise, or to start my own company.
Connection between various disciplines
Nanotechnology taught me to quickly recognize the connection between seemingly different phenomena and lines of research from various disciplines. Some phenomena are named differently in different disciplines, but the basic principles are similar and understanding these similarities can help with defining better research questions.
The University of Twente has many world leading research groups. I found it difficult to choose between the wide range of possible projects that these research groups had to offer. In the end, I chose an experimental topic that I found closest to fundamental research.
After finishing Nanotechnology
After finishing my Master’s programme in 2007, I continued to do a PhD at the FOM Institute AMOLF and I received my doctorate degree from the University of Amsterdam in 2011. I then went to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light as a post-doc.
In 2015 I joined the physics department at Utrecht University, where I started the new research group in Physics of Light in Complex Systems. My current scientific activities are mainly focused on detecting single electron processes using tools of nano-optics. I call this research direction nanoElectroPhotonics or in short nano-EPics."