Andrea Alù, an engineering professor at UT-Austin, has an amazing job description: He makes things invisible. Alù is a leading innovator in metamaterials, artificial materials with properties that allow electromagnetic waves to wrap around them. Those include radio waves--creating the possibility of more efficient antennas--and, at a very small scale, even the light waves that our eyes perceive. That light-bending technology could allow for the creation of microscopes with drastically improved performance. For his work, NSF presented Alù with its 2015 Alan T. Waterman Award, which recognizes outstanding young researchers.

Credit: NSF