Optical Society Presents Prizes at Annual Meeting

The Optical Society of America announced the winners of its awards, medals, and prizes for 2002 at the society’s annual meeting held in Orlando, Florida, in October.

James P. Gordon received the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Endowment for his “numerous seminal contributions and fundamental insights into quantum electronics, including construction of the first maser, the concepts of confocal laser resonators, optical solitons, and quantum effects in communications systems.” Gordon retired from Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, but is still active as a technical consultant.

The Esther Hoffman Beller Award was presented to Emil Wolf for his “numerous outstanding contributions as an educator, but especially for the influence of his books, which have been educating optical scientists and engineers for more than forty years.” He is the Wilson Professor of Optical Physics at the University of Rochester in New York and Provost’s Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Central Florida’s School of Optics/CREOL.

The Distinguished Service Award went this year to Boris Stoicheff for his “exceptional volunteer service to OSAover three decades, including the presidency, the board of directors, the publications council, the society objectives and planning committee, and various other committees.” He is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto.

Benny Landa was the recipient of the Edwin H. Land Medal, which is cosponsored by OSA and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology. Landa, founder of Indigo, which was recently acquired by Hewlett- Packard, is a strategic adviser to the CEO of HP. He was honored for his “pioneering work in the invention, development, and commercialization of liquid toner electrophotography” and for “outstanding creativity that has had a major public impact.”

The OSA Leadership Award/New Focus Prize went this year to Ellen Ochoa, a NASA astronaut, in recognition of her “pioneering status as the first Hispanic woman astronaut, her unstinting efforts to serve as a positive role model for women in general, and Hispanic women in particular, and her generous contributions of time to the optics community.”

Susana Marcos Celestino received the Adolph Lomb Medal for her “contributions to our knowledge of the optics of the eye and the interactions of light with the retina.” Celestino is a faculty research scientist at the Instituto de Óptica in Madrid, Spain.

The Archie Mahan Prize was shared by Edward W. Hagley, Lu Deng, William D. Phillips, Keith Burnett, and Charles W. Clark for their article “The Atom Laser,” which appeared in the May 2001 issue of Optics and Photonics News. The coauthors were honored for a “focused and well-organized article that succinctly connects recent observations in the field of phase coherent matter waves with early 20th century research on Bose—Einstein condensation.” Hagley is a cofounder of Acadia Optronics; Deng is a research physicist at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland; Phillips, who was a cowinner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, is a physicist and fellow at NIST in Gaithersburg and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park; Burnett is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford; and Clark is chief of the electron and optical physics division at NIST in Gaithersburg.

The David Richardson Medal was awarded to Arthur H. Guenther for his “pioneering contributions and continued leadership in the study of laserinduced damage of optical materials, and for exemplary guidance in enabling the infrastructure for technical optics development.” He is president of the International Commission for Optics and the Center for High Technology Materials at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Pierre Meystre, Regents Professor of Optical Sciences and Physics and chair of quantum optics at the University of Arizona, Tucson, received this year’s R. W. Wood Prize for his “seminal contributions to free-electron laser, cavity QED [quantum electrodynamics], and micromaser; and most recently, the ‘invention’ of the new field of nonlinear atom optics.”

The Allen Prize went to Iain Fletcher Howieson for his “design, development, and fabrication of a novel, lightweight, near-infrared tunable diode laser spectrometer that made immediate and valuable contributions to balloon and aircraft-borne characterizations of trace atmospheric gases.” He is an optical systems engineer at quantumBEAM Ltd in Cambridge, UK.

The Max Born Award was presented to John L. Hall, senior scientist at NIST and JILA, both in Boulder, Colorado, for “pioneering the field of stable lasers, including their applications in fundamental physics and, most recently, in the stabilization of femtosecond lasers to provide dramatic advances in optical-frequency metrology.

Daniel Malacara garnered the Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize for his “outstanding contributions to the art of interferometry and the science of optical testing passed on to posterity through his many publications and the education of his students.” Malacara, professor of optical engineering at the Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica in León, Mexico, was also cited for establishing several scientific institutions in that country.

The Nick Holonyak Jr Award was presented to Pallab Bhattacharya, James R. Mellor Professor of Engineering and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was recognized for his “fundamental contributions to the development and understanding of quantum-dot lasers and other quantum-confined photonic devices.”

The Ellis R. Lippincott Award, cosponsored by the Coblentz Society and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, was awarded to Sanford A. Asher for “pioneering the development of ultraviolet Raman methods and demonstrating their applications to vibrational spectroscopy in analytical, biophysical, and materials chemistry.” He is a professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

James C. Bergquist received the William F. Meggers Award for his “seminal contributions to high-resolution, high-accuracy laser spectroscopy with applications to fundamental metrology and clocks.” He is a research physicist with NIST in Boulder, Colorado.

George Sperling was presented with the Edgar D. Tillyer Award for his “innovative research in human visual information processing, specifically in: flicker perception; spatial vision; binocular vision; masking; visual memory; visual attention; and motion perception.” He is a UCI Distinguished Professor in the department of cognitive sciences, the department of neurobiology and behavior, and the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, all at the University of California, Irvine.

The John Tyndall Award, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Lasers & Electro-Optics Society, was awarded to Neal S. Bergano for his “outstanding technical contributions and leadership in the advancement of global undersea fiber-optic communication systems.” He is the managing director of system research at TyCom Laboratories in Eatontown, New Jersey.

OSA also recognized achievements in optical engineering by presenting its Engineering Excellence Awards to Timothy Day, Christopher Doerr, and David Peckham. Day, chief technology officer and founder of New Focus Inc in San Jose, California, was honored for his “pioneering work on the development, production, and widespread commercial deployment of tunable external cavity diode lasers.” Doerr, a distinguished member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, was recognized for “groundbreaking research on photonic integrated circuits and its impact on the telecommunications industry.” And Peckham, a consulting member of the technical staff at OFS Optics, in Norcross, Georgia, was cited for his “contributions to the design of dispersion compensating fibers for terrestrial and submarine optical transmission systems, which enable higher capacity and lower cost undersea networks.”