prof. dr. Irena Drevenšek Olenik

Irena DREVENŠEK OLENIK is a full professor of physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Ljubljana and a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Complex Matter at J. Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She obtained her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Ljubljana in 1996. After this, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. In 1999, she returned to Slovenia and became first a teaching assistant and then, in 2005, a lecturer in physics at the University of Ljubljana. In the study year 2005-06, she was a visiting professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, and in the study year 2012-13, a visiting professor at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. Since 2018, she has been heading the research group “Light & Matter”, whose main research activities take place in the field of soft matter physics. Part of the group is also active in the field of biomedical optics. The main expertise of the group lies in experimental research of complex soft materials by various optical methods. She is a coauthor of more than 150 research articles in international journals and of more than 250 conference contributions, including over 35 invited talks. She is also an author/coauthor of 9 scientific book chapters, 1 textbook on optics, several professional and popular science articles, and 3 patents. In addition to research and teaching, she regularly participates in various activities for the popularization of science in public.