an important observation, which Hess made from his extensive studies of slow light in semiconductor quantum dots and the dynamics of their spontaneous emission close to the stopped-light point in photonic crystals. Hess showed theoretically that a way to overcome this fundamental limitation of conventional media was to use nanoplasmonic waveguide structures. Hess has also made contributions to spatiotemporal and nonlinear dynamics in semiconductor lasers and research in computational photonics. Algorithms and codes developed in his group run on high-performance parallel computers and have been used to elucidate a rich variety of aspects of modern nano-physics ranging from the definition of temperature in nanoscale systems, to optimisation of ultrashort pulses in experimentally realised quantum-dot semiconductor optical amplifiers. Since 2011, Hess developed the theory of optical activity in chiral nanoplasmonic metamaterials that provided explanation of experiments on tunability in self-organised gold metamaterials. Recently Hess has started to develop "meta-lasers" and proposed "stopped-light nanolasing". This exploits and unites his competence in nanoplasmonic metamaterials, quantum photonics and semiconductor lasers. Initially the motivation for the work was to compensate dissipative losses in metamaterials by introducing gain. But now, one aims at realising a new class of ultrafast ‘stopped-light nanolasers’, with unprecedented design features such as being smaller than a fifth of the wavelength and ultrafast and providing a platform to integrate both light and amplified plasmons, to enable integration at the nanoscale with semiconductor chips for telecommunications. References Hamm, J. M., & Hess, O. (2013). Two Two-Dimensional Materials are Better Than One, Science 340, 1298–1299. Pusch, A., Wuestner, S., Hamm, J. M., Tsakmakidis, K. L., & Hess, O. (2012). Coherent Amplification and Noise in Gain-Enhanced Nanoplasmonic Metamaterials: A Maxwell-Bloch Langevin Approach. ACS Nano, 6, 2420–2431. Hamm, J. M., Wuestner, S., Tsakmakidis, K. L., & Hess, O. (2011). Theory of light amplification in active fishnet metamaterials. Phys Rev Lett, 107, 167405. Wuestner, S., Pusch, A., Tsakmakidis, K. L., Hamm, J. M., & Hess, O. (2010). Overcoming losses with gain in a negative refractive index metamaterial. Phys Rev Lett, 105, 127401. Hess, O. (2008). Optics: Farewell to flatland. Nature, 455, 299–300. Bohringer, K., & Hess, O. (2008). A full-time-domain approach to spatio-temporal dynamics of semiconductor lasers. I. Theoretical formulation. Prog Quant Electron, 32, 159–246. Ruhl, T., Spahn, P., Hermann, C., Jamois, C., & Hess, O. (2006). Double-inverse-opal photonic crystals: The route to photonic bandgap switching. Adv Funct Materials, 16, 885. Gehrig, E., Hess, O., Ribbat, C.,