Rate My Professor David Powell

Associate Professor David Powell is an academic in the School of Engineering and Information Technology at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales. His research focuses on metamaterials, structured materials exhibiting unusual electromagnetic and acoustic properties. Powell obtained his PhD from RMIT University in 2006 in the field of surface acoustic wave biosensors. From 2006 to 2017, he served as a researcher at the Nonlinear Physics Centre of the Australian National University, where he conducted research on fundamental and applied aspects of metamaterials operating in microwave, terahertz, infrared, and acoustic domains. Since 2017, he has been affiliated with UNSW Canberra, starting as a Senior Lecturer and currently holding the position of Associate Professor. He possesses expertise in microwave, acoustic, and terahertz experiments, particularly in nonlinear and tunable metamaterials, and is a member of the Advanced Electromagnetics group.

Powell's work has demonstrated several new forms of nonlinear metamaterials and unique tuning mechanisms for reconfiguring metamaterial functionality. A prominent area of interest involves metamaterials that combine electromagnetic and mechanical degrees of freedom to produce novel coupled dynamics. He has made theoretical contributions to bianisotropy and chirality, as well as to the understanding of modes in open resonant systems such as metamaterials. To this end, he released OpenModes, an open-source code for computing modes of open electromagnetic structures with strong radiation losses. Powell has authored 104 journal articles and 4 book chapters. Notable publications include "Magnetoelastic metamaterials" (Nature Materials, 2012), "Resonant leaky modes in all-dielectric metasystems: Fundamentals and applications" (Physics Reports, 2023), "Structural tunability in metamaterials" (Applied Physics Letters, 2009), "Sound trapping in an open resonator" (Nature Communications, 2021), "Huygens’ metadevices for parametric waves" (Physical Review X, 2018), and "Acoustic resonances in non-Hermitian open systems" (Nature Reviews Physics, 2024). His research has garnered over 6,000 citations on Google Scholar, reflecting significant impact in the fields of electromagnetism, nanophotonics, acoustics, and related disciplines.