Sonakshi Arora recently joined the Kuipers Lab for her PhD at TU Delft. She completed her Master’s degree at Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany. During her master project she worked on the excitonic properties of two-dimensional semiconductors to probe out-of-plane defect-bound states at low temperatures. For her PhD, she has chosen to delve into the field of nano-optics and hopes to strengthen her experimental skills to create new interesting materials to manipulate light with. She is excited to work on topological photonic crystals using near-field microscopy and possibly mix them up with 2D materials.