Ortwin Hess currently holds the Leverhulme Chair in Metamaterials  in the Blackett Laboratory (Department of Physics) at Imperial College London. He obtained the PhD degree from the Technical University of Berlin (Germany) in 1993 and the Habilitation at the University of Stuttgart in 1997. From 2003 to 2010 he was professor at the University of Surrey (Guildford, UK) and visiting professor at Stanford University (1997/98) and at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich (1999/2000).  Ortwin’s research interests bridge theoretical condensed matter physics with photonics and are focused on light-matter interaction in nano-photonics, metamaterials and spatio-temporal nano-laser dynamics. He discovered the ‘trapped-rainbow’ principle, had the idea of stopped-light lasing and made defining contributions to the fields of spatio-temporal dynamics of semiconductor lasers, ultraslow light in metamaterials, complex quantum dot photonics and photonic crystals and strong coupling in nanoplasmonics. Ortwin pioneered active nanoplasmonics and optical metamaterials with quantum gain for which he is awarded the 2016 Royal Society Rumford Medal.