Professor Matthew Pelton of the UMBC Physics Department was recently named 2023 Presidential Research Professor - one of the highest awards given at UMBC. Professor Pelton is an experimental physicist conducting research in several fields: plasmonic nanocavities, nanoscale fluid dynamics, and charge transfer on the nanoscale. He was recently elected as a Fellow of Optica and is the lead UMBC investigator in the NSF STC Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand. In addition, he is the managing editor of Nanophotonics and has published a book and more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles - many of them with his graduate students at UMBC.