Prof. Sanju Gupta is Associate professor and has substantial experience and expertise in functional nanomaterials and characterization with an emphasis on energy, water and biophysics- related research. Additionally, she is working in the area of topological and geometrical aspects of materials and co-authored publications on this topic including an invited feature article in MRS Bulletin and the recent News Feature in MRS Bulletin with the co-editor (Dr. Avadh Saxena) about the underpinning role(s) of topology in the 2016 Physics and Chemistry Nobel Prizes. She has co-organized several conferences and symposia on this topic as well as on advanced nanomaterials and applications. She has won many accolades (e.g. Recipient of NSF Fellowship, NIH Fellowship, DOE Fellowship, JSPS Fellowship and Junior Investigator Award, WISE Award) since her graduate study in addition to being well-placed and known in the materials community for more than two decades including the topology community. As a result, she is co-organizing an Applied Topology conference with colleagues in the Physics and Mathematics departments at WKU in 2018. Dr. Avadh Saxena is Group Leader of the Condensed Matter and Complex Systems theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He has extensive experience in working on topology related problems both in materials science and condensed matter physics with a large number of publications in this field. He is a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He serves on the advisory boards of several international conferences, has organized numerous workshops and symposia related to topology and functional materials (APS, MRS, SIAM, among others), has co-authored an MRS Bulletin article on this topic and a news Feature on 2016 Nobel Prizes, has co-edited four books (with Springer) and many special issues of research journals. His recent work on topological defects, specifically the magnetic textures called skyrmions, has been featured in Discovery News. He holds Adjunct Professor positions at the University of Barcelona, University of Arizona and Virginia Tech. Recently he was granted the prestigious Affiliate Professorship at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. He also serves as an advisor for the National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan.
