Dr Ajay Ram Srimath Kandada received his PhD in Physics from Politecnico di Milano, Italy in 2013 for his work on ultrafast spectroscopy of organic photovoltaic materials. He subsequently moved to the Italian Institute of Technology as a post-doctoral researcher to investigate the excited state dynamics and defect physics of bulk metal-halide perovskites. In 2016, he received the Marie Sklodowska Curie global fellowship from the European Commission to investigate coherent exciton dynamics using advanced optical spectroscopies at University of Montreal (Canada), Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) and at the Italian Institute of Technology (Italy). He was appointed as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University in 2020 and later as tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2022. His research interests include electronic and optical properties of emerging semiconductors probed by ultrafast nonlinear spectroscopy and quantum-optical methods.