Ventsislav K. Valev

Ventsislav K. Valev, (born 31 August 1976 in Silistra, Bulgaria), is a Bulgarian physicist at the University of Bath, where he served as the Head of Department (2022-2025). He works in the fields of nonlinear nanophotonics and chirality, including the Hyper Rayleigh Scattering Optical Activity effect.

Career Valev holds a PhD degree from Radboud University, obtained under the supervision of Prof. Theo Rasing. Valev joined the University of Bath as a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society and Reader (Associate Professor) in 2014. He served as the Head of the University's Department of Physics from 2022 to 2025. Later work from Valev and co-authors demonstrated sub-wavelength metal reshaping associated with temperature increases in plasmonic hotspots. Valev’s group has experimentally demonstrated several nonlinear chiral optical effects that were theoretically predicted decades earlier by David L. Andrews. Hyper-Mie Optical Activity, Hyper-Tyndall Optical Activity, and Hyper-Raman Optical Activity.

Awards and recognition 2025, Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. 2023, Thomas Young Medal, from the Institute of Physics. 2023, Elected Optica Fellow. 2022, Elected Fellow of SPIE. 2022, Horizon Prize, from the Royal Society of Chemistry. 2021, Elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics, FInstP. 2018, Vice-Chancellor's Award for Public Engagement with Research.