He earned his doctorate degree in materials/inorganic chemistry from Karl-Franzens University Graz, Austria, and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Bartl is the scientific co-founder of Navillum Nanotechnologies, and currently, he is the director of the Integrative Research Group on Plasmonic Metamaterials of the Utah Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. He was the recipient of a “DuPont Young Professorship,” and was named a “Brilliant 10” researcher by Popular Science magazine in 2010 and a Scialog Fellow by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement in 2013. His research group studies functional nanostructured materials for energy and information technology applications, including bioinspired photonics, magnonics, nanocrystals and thin films.