Samer Kurdi

Samer Kurdi is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University at the Quantum Photonics Laboratory. He currently holds an NWO Veni fellowship (2024-2027) focusing on mapping spin dynamics in van der Waals materials.

Samer was awarded a Nanotechnology Engineering BASc in 2012 (University of Waterloo, Canada). Since then, he has had a diverse academic and entrepreneurial career in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Tanzania, Japan and the UK. His double-diploma MSc in Functionalized Advanced Materials and Engineering (FAME) at Grenoble INP (France) and TU Darmstadt (Germany) was fully-funded by a Erasmus Mundus scholarship.

Samer’s PhD, at the University of Cambridge (UK), was part of an innovative training network Marie Curie program called SELECTA, where his research focused on magnetic materials and spin-electronics (spintronics). Samer was a visting researcher at the National Institute of Materials (NIMS, Japan), University of Bielefeld (Germany) and the National Metrology Institute (INRiM, Italy) during this time.

Before joining Heriot-Watt University, Samer worked in quantum sensing using spins in diamond, spin dynamics and time-resolved optical magnetic charachterization at TU Delft and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in the groups of Prof. Toeno van der Sar and Dr. Marcos H. D. Guimarães.