Dr. Panagiotis Dallas‘ research team has developed a new generation of sponges that, by incorporating special Covalent Organic Frameworks, absorb almost all mercury (99% of the metal content in the water under 300 minute constant flow) and dissolved oil (>90% in 200 minutes and 100% after a few hours) from water. This pioneering research was published in the leading journal Materials Advances.

Dr Christos Riziotis, Director of Research at the TPCI/NHRF, was awarded the “Excellent Paper Award” for his Invited Talk entitled “Photonics as Enabling Technology for Telecommunications, Sensing, Biomedical, Quantum Devices, and Systems”, at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Topics on Measurement and Simulation (ATOMS 2026), held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

The cutting-edge research conducted in TPCI/NHRF on wireless optical communications in underwater environments was presented at the Special Session “Wireless and Wave-Based Technologies for Harsh and Complex Environments” of the EuCAP 2026 conference. A comprehensive and unified channel model was presented, which accounts for scattering losses, turbulence, misalignment, and disorientation. This allowed us to extract the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio, as well as a novel closed-form expression for the outage probability.

In an invited lecture at Bosch’s corporate research division in Germany, Associate Researcher Dr. Aristotelis Sgouros demonstrated how multiscale molecular simulations bridge the gap between microscopic interactions and macroscopic material performance. This computational framework enables the rational design of advanced materials by using molecular-level insights to predict key properties like adhesion, rheology, and fracture.

Dr. Christos Riziotis, Director of Research, participated as Invited Speaker at the International Conference SPIE Photonics Europe 2026 (Strasbourg 12-16 April 2026). During his talk entitled “Hybrid Integrated Scalable Circuits in Silica with Embedded Quantum Emitters”, Dr C. Riziotis presented the novel technology of quantum emitters’ integration in photonic integrated circuits, exclusively developed at NHRF, together with recent experimental results towards the implementation of quantum computers and ultrasensitive quantum sensing devices.