Prof. Andrea Armani is currently jointed appointed at the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) and at the University of Southern California (USC). At EIT, she is serving as the Sr Director of Engineering and Physical Sciences, and at USC, she holds the Ray Irani Chair in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science with courtesy appointments in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Chemistry. Previously, she held several administrative positions including serving as the Vice Dean of New Initiatives in the Viterbi School of Engineering and as the inaugural Director of the John D. O’Brien Nanofabrication Laboratory. In this role, she oversaw the design, construction, and start-up of the new core nanofabrication facility at USC. She spent her 2015 sabbatical at Northrop Grumman as a Northrop Faculty Fellow.
Prof. Armani received her BA in physics from the University of Chicago and her PhD in applied physics with a minor in biology from the California Institute of Technology, where she continued as the Clare Boothe Luce post-doctoral Fellow in biology and chemical engineering. She joined the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science department in the Viterbi School of Engineering in 2008 and held the Fluor Early Chair in Engineering from 2010-2017.
Prof. Armani is actively involved in several different professional societies, serving on and chairing conference committees for IEEE, Optica (CLEO), and SPIE (Photonics West). She routinely serves on review panels for NSF, NIH, and ARPA-E, and she was previously a member of NIH study section F. She is an Editorial Advisory Board member for APL Photonics and ACS Photonics (associate editor). She served on the editorial staff for Optics Letters (associate editor from 2011-2017, features editor 2018-2024),. She is a senior member of IEEE and AIChE, and an elected Fellow of Optica, SPIE, AAAS, and NAI. She is also an elected member of Sigma Xi. She serves on several technical society award and leadership committees, including the NAE’s Communication Group. She previously servied on SPIE’s EDI and Telecommunications Committees and was the faculty advisor for the USC student chapters of AIChE and Optica/SPIE and the Viterbi School of Engineering Honors Program.
Prof. Armani has received several awards for research and mentoring, including the ONR Young Investigator Award, Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program New Investigator Award, NIH New Innovator Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the Optica Robert E. Hopkins Leadership Award. She was selected to attend the NAE Frontiers in Engineering and the NAE Frontiers in Engineering Education, and she has been invited to attend all of the NAE/RAE/CAE Grand Challenge Scholar Summits since the conception of the program. The translational impact of her research on broader society and her thought leadership has been recognized by her being named a Technology Review Top 35 Innovators under 35, Popular Science’s Brilliant 10, World Economic Forum’s Young Scientist, STS Forum Future Leader, STS Forum Young Engineering Leader, and World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader. In addition, her dedication to mentoring the next generation of scientists and engineers has been recognized with the USC Mellon Mentoring Award for Undergraduate Mentoring and the Hanna Reisler Award for Mentoring.