OSA Recognizes Achievements in Optics, Photonics

The Optical Society of America has announced this year’s recipients of 15 of its most prestigious awards, which are being distributed at a ceremony on 19 October during the society’s annual meeting in Tucson, Arizona.

Theodor W. Hänsen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, is receiving the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Endowment, OSA’s most prestigious prize. Hänsch is being recognized “for seminal contributions and landmark advances in optical science and atomic physics.”

The late Stephen Benton, founder of the MIT Media Laboratory’s spatial imaging group, is being honored posthumously with the Edwin H. Land Medal “for seminal research and innovation in 3D imaging, including the famed rainbow hologram.” The medal is awarded jointly by OSA and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology.

The Esther Hoffman Beller Award goes this year to Thomas K. Gay-lord, Julius Brown Chair and Re-gents’ Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He receives the award “for innovative teaching that has brought the latest research results alive for students for 30 years and for his significant contributions to establishing Georgia Tech’s optics and photonics programs.”

Marin Soljačič is being awarded the Adolph Lomb Medal “for the discovery of novel soliton phenomena, and for seminal and innovative work in nonlinear and time-dependent photonic crystals.” Soljačič, a former principal research scientist at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, was named assistant professor of physics at MIT in September.

John Sandercock, founder and director of JRS Scientific Instruments in Zwillikon, Switzerland, is receiving the David Richardson Medal “for pioneering work in developing the multi-pass Tandem Fabry-Perot Spectrometer and for contributions to the Brillouin spectroscopy of surfaces, interfaces, and thin films.”

This year the R. W. Wood Prize is being presented to Masataka Nakazawa “for inventing the 1.48-μm InGaAsP laser-diode-pumped erbium-doped fiber amplifier and the development of its application to high-speed optical communications and short-pulse lasers.” Nakazawa is a professor at the optical communication laboratory of the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.

Ravindra A. Athale is this year’s recipient of the OSA Leadership Award/New Focus-Bookham Prize “for his visionary leadership within the optics community through research contributions, innovations in teaching, and groundbreaking technology programs.” Athale is a senior communications engineer at the Washington C3 Center at MITRE Corp in McLean, Virginia.

The Charles Hard Townes Award goes to Paul Corkum, group leader of atomic, molecular and optical science at the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. Corkum receives the award “for his key contributions to the understanding of the physics of atoms and molecules in intense laser fields and the application of these ideas to ultra-fast measurement techniques.”

P. Daniel Dapkus, W. M. Keck Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he is also the director of the Center for Photonic Technology, is this year’s recipient of the Nick Holonyak Jr Award “for his seminal contributions to the development of metal organic chemical vapor deposition and its application to quantum well laser devices.”

The C. E. K. Mees Medal is being presented to Harrison H. Barrett, Regents Professor of Optical Sciences, Radiology and Applied Mathematics at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and director of the Center for Gamma-Ray Imaging. He is receiving the award “for outstanding contributions leading to widespread applications of optical imaging science in disciplines as diverse as medicine and astrophysics.”

Alexander E. Kaplan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is this year’s recipient of the Max Born Award. Kaplan is being honored “for seminal contributions to nonlinear interface and optical bistability effects, hysteretic resonances of a single electron, and physics of subfemtosecond pulses.”

G. Michael Morris, founder and CEO of Apollo Optical Systems and co-founder and CEO of RPC Photonics, both in Rochester, New York, receives the Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize “for innovation in the design, theory, and application of diffractive and hybrid optical elements to solve a wide range of problems.”

The Ellis R. Lippincott Award, which is presented jointly with the Coblentz Society and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, will go to Jaan Laane, a chemistry professor at Texas A&M University in College Station and editor of the Journal of Molecular Structure. He receives the honor “for his innovative use of vibrational spectroscopy to determine molecular structure and to unravel complex intramolecular dynamics.”

Roger Stolen, a member of the research faculty at the Fiber and Electro-Optics Center at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, where he is a retired professor of electrical engineering, is this year’s winner of the John Tyndall Award, copresented with the IEEE Lasers and the Electro-Optics Society. Stolen receives the honor “for fundamental contributions to the understanding of optical fiber nonlinearities.”

The William F. Meggers Award for 2005 goes to Daniel M. Neumark, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the chemical sciences division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Neumark is being presented with the honor “for his pioneering contributions to the molecular spectroscopy of transient species.”