Abstract: Phase-change materials (PCMs) have emerged as a promising platform to modulate light in a nonvolatile manner—a reversible switching between their stable amorphous and crystalline states leads to an impressive refractive index contrast (∆n, ∆k ~1−3). The last decade has seen a growing interest in such a combination of properties for a variety of nonvolatile programmable devices, such as metasurfaces, tunable filters, phase/amplitude modulators, color pixels, thermal camouflage, photonic memories/computing, plasmonics, and more. Thus, PCMs have demonstrated outstanding versatility and integration in low-energy photonic applications. Integrated photonics, in particular, has benefited from the progress of PCMs such as Sb2Se3 and Ge2Sb2Te5 for ultra-compact phase and amplitude modulators, respectively, using all-optical and electro-thermal approaches. These low-energy devices allow small-form-factor quasi-passive silicon photonics, i.e. silicon photonics with zero-static power, yet with the ability to reconfigure actively—crucial properties in applications such as in-memory computing, optical synapses, zero-power photonic switches, trimming, and optical storage. This talk will discuss the fundamental principles and switching mechanisms of PCMs in integrated photonic platforms and the state-of-the-art achievements, current efforts, and open challenges. Bio: Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has led the Photonic Materials & Devices groups since 2021. Before joining UMD, Carlos was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, received a DPhil (PhD) degree in 2017 from the University of Oxford (UK), an MSc degree in Optics and Photonics in 2013 from the KIT (Germany), and a BSc in Physics in 2010 from the University of Antioquia (Colombia). Carlos’s scientific interests focus on studying and developing new on-chip technologies driven by the synergy between nanomaterials and photonics. Local J-1035 Pavillon J. A. Bombardier, Polytechnique Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada