Rob Devlin

Rob Devlin is the co-founder and CEO of Metalenz, the first company to take metasurface optics out of the lab and into mass-market consumer devices. A Harvard-trained applied physicist who studied under Federico Capasso, he turned a Science cover paper into a fabless optical-semiconductor company that prints flat lenses in standard chip foundries. Under his leadership Metalenz shipped the world's first metasurfaces in consumer products with STMicroelectronics in 2022 and launched Polar ID, a polarization-based face authentication system. He keeps the first wafer of 10,000 metasurface lenses on his desk as a reminder of how a single fabrication shot eclipsed an entire PhD's worth of handmade devices.