OSA Awards Given at Fall Meeting

A highlight of the Optical Society of America’s annual fall meeting in Long Beach, California, last October, was the presentation of several awards in recognition of notable contributions to the field.

The 2001 Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Endowment, OSA’s most prestigious honor, was presented to Nick Holonyak Jr, John Bardeen Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Holonyak was recognized by the society for his “outstanding, celebrated, and precedent-setting work in semiconductor science and technology.” The Esther Hoffman Beller Medal for 2001 went to Douglas S. Goodman, a Distinguished Engineer at the Polaroid Corp in Waltham, Massachusetts. Goodman was cited by OSA for his “dedication to teach and inspire others about optics.”

Duncan T. Moore, the Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake Professor of Optical Engineering at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics in New York, received the 2001 OSA Leadership Award/New Focus Prize in recognition of his “technical, educational, and service contributions to the optics community and for contributions in public policy.”

Barbara A. Paldus, accepted the 2001 Adolph Lomb Award for her work on the “development of the ultrasensitive absolute method for trace analysis of gas-phase species.” Paldus, founder and chief technology officer of BlueLeaf Networks in Long Beach, California, is the first woman to receive the Lomb Award since its inception in 1940.

The winner of the C. E. K. Mees Medal for 2001 was Humio Inaba, who was honored by OSA for his “contributions in quantum and optical electronics.” Inaba is a professor emeritus at the Tohuku Institute of Technology and Tohuku University in Sendai, Japan.

The 2001 David Richardson Medal was awarded to Huib Visser, a senior research fellow at the TNO Institute of Applied Physics (Delft University) in the Netherlands. The prize citation acknowledged Visser’s “innovative designs of complex optical space instrumentation.”

Federico Capasso, vice president of physical research at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, accepted the R. W. Wood Prize for 2001. The prize citation praised his “seminal contributions to the invention, demonstration, and development of the quantum cascade laser.”

The 2001 Allen Prize went to David N. Whiteman, a physical scientist in the atmospheres laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. OSA acknowledged Whiteman for his “significant advances in the detection of water vapor, liquid water, and aerosols in the atmosphere using Raman lidar.”

Bernard Yurke received the Max Born Award for 2001 for his “contributions in bosonic and fermionic squeezed states and the theory of local reality violations,” according to the citation. Yurke is a distinguished member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies.

The 2001 Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize went to Warren J. Smith, chief scientist at Kaiser Electro-Optics in Vista, California. Smith was honored for “providing a lifetime effort in optical engineering and applied optics.”

Shuji Nakamura, a professor of materials science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received the 2001 Nick Holonyak Jr Award for his “original demonstration and commercialization of GaN-based semiconductor lasers and LEDs.”

The Ellis R. Lippincott Award for 2001 went to Lester Andrews, a professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Andrews was recognized for his “prodigious vibrational spectroscopic investigations” and for “furthering quantum chemical calculations of vibrational frequencies.”

Frank C. De Lucia, University Professor of Physics at Ohio State University in Columbus, received the 2001 William F. Meggers Award. The citation praised De Lucia for his “pioneering work in the development for the submillimeter-wave region of the electromagnetic spectrum and its application to scientific problems in physics, chemistry, and astronomy.”

The 2001 Edwin H. Land Medal was presented earlier in the year to George Smith and Willard Boyle, who shared the prize for their “invention and development of the chargecoupled device.” Both are researchers who are retired from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.