Posted on November 14, 2025 in ASRC News, Photonics Initiative
An $11.4 million international collaboration aims to revolutionize how data travels through the air—using structured surfaces to process radio signals faster and more efficiently than ever before.
From the first sparks of Marconi’s wireless telegraph to today’s lightning-fast cellular networks, wireless communications have been shaping the way humans connect. But as our digital lives expand—streaming, sensing, navigating, and communicating across billions of devices—our wireless infrastructure is straining to keep up. The technology that once transformed the world is now reaching its limits in speed, complexity, and energy demand.
Professor Andrea Alù and his Photonics Initiative team at the ASRC have been developing a bold new approach to this global challenge. His team together with colleagues from the Technical University of Berlin, the CNRS in Paris and ETH Zurich have been awarded a highly competitive $11.44 million European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant, which aims at reimagining how wireless systems transmit and process data—leveraging the physics of radio wave propagation and their interactions with structured surfaces, known as metasurfaces, pioneered by Alù’s team.
Rethinking Wireless from the Ground Up
Today’s wireless networks rely on intricate layers of electronics to translate radio waves into digital information. Each layer consumes power and adds complexity. The ERC-funded WePhICom project—short for Waves, Physics, Information, and Computation—seeks to streamline this process by moving much of the signal handling out of traditional circuits and into the waves themselves.
The key lies in metasurfaces, ultra-thin materials engineered with features much smaller than the wavelength of the radio waves they control. These surfaces can be programmed to bend, focus or filter radio signals dynamically, enabling them to process data before it ever reaches an electronic chip.
“Our group has been exploring for a few years how to perform signal processing directly in the wave domain,” said Alù, founding director of the Photonics Initiative and Distinguished and Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center. “By controlling radio waves with tailored metasurfaces, we can reduce the heavy lifting that’s usually done by electronic circuits—making wireless systems faster, more adaptable, and far more energy-efficient. This Synergy grant will allow us to leverage our initial demonstrations and work with world-leading communication and information experts to translate these advances into a new age of wireless communications.”
A Global Team for a Global Challenge
The Synergy Grant is a prestigious funding scheme by the European Research Council (ERC) designed to support ambitious, frontier research projects that require the collaborative effort of up to four principal investigators. These grants aim to enable groundbreaking scientific discoveries by combining complementary skills, knowledge and resources to tackle complex research challenges that cannot be addressed by a single researcher alone. Open to all fields of science, the ERC Synergy program fosters international collaboration and supports researchers with substantial funding to push the boundaries of knowledge.
The WePhICom project unites four world-leading, highly interdisciplinary research teams whose expertise spans physics, engineering, communications and computation: Alù’s team will closely collaborate on this endeavor with the groups of Giuseppe Caire at Technische Universität Berlin, Marco Di Renzo at CNRS, Paris, and Christoph Studer at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Together, the researchers will develop the theoretical foundations, hardware demonstrators, algorithms and communication / computation protocols needed to bring this concept to life. The CUNY ASRC will lead the project’s Fundamental Physics and New Devices component, supported by $3.3 million of the total grant.
“This collaboration allows us to merge ideas that rarely come together—wave physics, information theory, and advanced computation,” said Alù. “It’s an extraordinary opportunity to cross traditional boundaries and design from the bottom up new communication systems that are not only more powerful, but also more sustainable.”
Towards Smarter, Greener Connectivity
As global data demands skyrocket, wireless networks are consuming ever more electricity. Industry experts warn that, without new solutions, the energy footprint of data transmission could soon become unsustainable.
The WePhICom team’s vision offers a path forward. By processing signals at the radio-wave level, the technology could slash the number of electronic components needed in future communication devices—cutting costs, reducing power consumption, and easing environmental impact.
In practical terms, this could mean smarter, greener 6G and beyond—networks capable of handling massive data loads for applications like autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and global sensing systems, all while using less energy.
“If successful, this work will redefine how we think about connectivity,” Alù said. “We’re not just improving today’s networks—we’re laying the foundation for the next century of wireless communications.”