Robert Halir carried out his PhD research in the framework of a prestigious national scholarship, which enabled extended visits at and collaborative research with the Canadian National Research Council, Ghent University and Cornell University. He received his PhD with highest honors in 2010 and worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the European Mirthe project. Since 2011 he has also been associated with the Andalusian Institute for Nanomedicine and Biotechnology (Bionand). In 2012 he became Assistant Professor at the Department of Communications Engineering at the University of Málaga. Since 2019 he has been a Tenured Associate Professor. He has co-authored more than 140 journal and conference papers and holds six patents. He has been a member of the committees of the IEEE Photonics Conference, the European Conference on Optical Communications as well as CLEO Europe. His main research interests are in the fields of subwavelength metamaterials, where he has authored both some of the seminal papers, as well as several authoritative reviews, and in integrated biosensing, where he has recently co-founded the start-up Bioherent.