Tal Schwartz, born in Haifa, Israel, studied physics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in 2008 for his research on nonlinear dynamics in stochastic optical systems under the supervision of Prof. Moti Segev. During his PhD he studied the transport of light in disordered waveguide arrays, photorefractive optical solitons and pattern formation in nonlinear optical systems. He had several achievemnets, including the first observation of Anderson localization in disordered photonic lattices and the first observation of spontaneous pattern formation with white light. He then moved to France for his postdoctoral studies at the Laboratory for Nanostructures led by Prof. Thomas Ebbesen at Strasbourg University under a Rothschild Fellowship from Yad Hanadiv Foundation and a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French Embassy in Israel. There he studied the interaction of light with organic molecules in nanostructures, focusing on strong coupling in organic cavities and plasmonic nanostructures. In 2012 he joined Tel Aviv University as a senior lecturer at the School of Chemistry, where he is currently establishing his independent research group.