Dr Helder M. Crespo

Associate Professor, University of Porto;
Co-founder, Sphere Ultrafast Photonics

Helder M. Crespo received the engineering degree (5 years) in Engineering Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, and the Ph.D. Degree in Physics from the same institute in 2006. In 2020 he obtained the Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from the University of Oxford, UK.

From 2001 to 2006 he was an Invited Professor of Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, Portugal, where since 2006 he was an Assistant Professor of Physics, having recently been promoted to Associate Professor (January 2021). Dr. Crespo will start a new appointment as Teaching Fellow in the Physics Department of Imperial College London in mid-February 2021.

Dr. Crespo was a post-doctoral researcher at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (2007), academic visitor at the Physics Department, Imperial College London, UK (2015) and Distinguished Researcher / Visiting Professor of the Department of Applied Physics, University of Salamanca, Spain (2016). Dr. Crespo is co-author of more than 140 peer-reviewed articles (50 articles in journals and the remaining in peer-reviewed conferences) and co-inventor of 6 patents, which include the dispersion-scan technique for ultrashort pulse characterization. He founded and leads the Ultrashort Laser Pulse Laboratory at the University of Porto.

 In 2013, he co-founded the spin-off company Sphere Ultrafast Photonics, which develops and produces ultrafast technology based on the dispersion-scan technique and where he serves as its CTO. Dr. Crespo is User Representative of Laserlab Europe (elected in 2015; reelected in 2019). His research interests include ultrafast nonlinear optics and photonics, in particular novel methods for the generation and measurement of extremely short light pulses in the few- to single-cycle regimes, and their application to ultrafast spectroscopy, high-harmonic generation and nonlinear microscopy. Dr. Crespo was a co-recipient of the Gulbenkian Science Prize 1998 (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal), for the discovery of ultrafast nondegenerate cascaded four-wave mixing, and winner of the Beacons of the Photonics Industry Award in the Entrepreneurs category (Photonics Spectra, USA) in September 2017.