John Weiner's doctoral work at the University of Chicago and subsequent post-doctoral work at Yale on crossed-beam ion-molecule collisions fixed his interest on how reactive collisions might be influenced by light fields. He established this line of research at the University of Maryland, where he was a full professor. Interaction between very slowly moving, cooled atoms in the presence of light gave rise to the field of "ultra-cold collisions," a subject Weiner vigorously pursued until he moved to the Université Paul Sabatier in France in 1997. There he established a research group to study the trapping and transport of ultracold atoms in the presence of optical fields, themselves shaped by neighbouring nanostructures. In 2007 he retired from Université Paul Sabatier and since then has been visiting professor in the physics institute at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil and a visiting fellow at the Centre for Nanoscale Science and Technology at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Professor Nunes was born in Recife, Pernambuco State, Brazil, in 1947. He obtained an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the School of Engineering at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) in 1971. He continued his advanced education by enrolling in the Physics and Pure Mathematics curriculum in the Institute of Professor Gleb Wataghin at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), obtaining his MS degree and PhD degrees in 1974 and 1977, respectively. Since then he has been on the faculty at several Brazilian universities and since 1997, he has been an Associate Professor at UFPE in Recife. He has received the Marechal Trompowski award for excellence in teaching at UFPE and has made many research contributions in the area of Optics, Semiconductors, Photonics and Nanoplasmonics. He has authored many scientific publications and holds a number of patents in the technologies associated with these scientific disciplines.