OSA Recognizes Contributions to Optical Science

The Optical Society of America recently announced the recipients of its awards and medals for 2004. These prizes will be presented at a ceremony on 12 October at OSA’s annual meeting in Rochester, New York.

David J. Wineland will receive the society’s most prestigious prize, the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Endowment. He is being recognized for the “development of laser-manipulated quantum engineering at the single-atom level and application of these methods to quantum logic systems, atomic frequency standards, and fundamental tests of quantum mechanics.” Wineland is leader of the ion storage group at the time and frequency division of NIST in Boulder, Colorado.

Wineland

The recipient of the Edwin H. Land Medal, awarded jointly by OSA and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, is Steven K. Case, founder and chairman of CyberOptics Corp in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was selected as medallist for his “pioneering work in laser-based inspection systems and the highly successful application of these systems in the electronics industry.”

The Esther Hoffman Beller Award will go this year to Janice A. Hudgings, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is being honored for her “innovative teaching methods and for her involvement in guiding undergraduate physics and engineering students in original, state-of-the-art, publishable research in optics and solid-state physics.”

Alexander A. Sawchuk has been chosen to receive the society’s Distinguished Service Award for “23 years of dedicated efforts on behalf of OSA, including vital contributions to publications, meetings, international relations, and general governance.” Sawchuk is a professor of electrical engineering and deputy director of the Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

The Adolph Lomb Medal for 2004 will go to Randy A. Bartels, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He is being honored for his “pioneering contributions to the coherent control of light, atoms, and molecules, including the shaped-pulse optimization of high-order harmonic soft x-ray radiation.”

Heidi Hofer and David R. Williams will share the Archie Mahan Prize for their article entitled “The Eye’s Mechanisms for Autocalibration,” which appeared in the January 2002 issue of Optics & Photonics News. Williams is the William G. Allyn Chair of Medical Optics and directs the Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, New York. Hofer is a research collaborator at that center.

The David Richardson Medal will be presented to Chungte Bill Chen, senior engineering fellow at Raytheon Co. He is being recognized for his “remarkable achievements in applying diffractive optical elements to the design of classical and conformal optical systems to obtain wide fields of view along with excellent aberration correction.”

Rangaswamy Srinivasan, James J. Wynne, and Samuel E. Blum will share the 2004 R. W. Wood Prize for their “discovery of pulsed ultraviolet laser surgery, wherein laser light cuts and etches biological tissue by photo-ablation with minimal collateral damage, leading to healing without significant scarring.” Srinivasan is president of UVTech Associates in Ossining, New York; Wynne is program manager for local education outreach at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York; and Blum is retired.

The OSA Leadership Award/New Focus–Bookham Prize recipient is Costas Fotakis, professor of physics at the University of Crete and director of the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser at the Foundation for Research and Technology in Crete. He was chosen for the honor for his “decade-long leadership of, and personal research contribution to, the field of laser applications to art conservation as manifested through publications, conference organization, and international advocacy.”

The Nick Holonyak Jr Award winner for 2004 is Petr G. Eliseev, research professor in the Center for High Technology Materials at the University of New Mexico, on leave from the P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow. He is being given the award for his “original and pioneering contributions to the physics and technology of semiconductor lasers, beginning with homojunctions, progressing to heterostructures of InGaAsP/InP, InGaAsSb/GaSb, and including ultra-low-threshold quantum-dot structures.”

The winner of the Allen Prize is Jens Biegert, group leader in atto-second science at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. He is being cited by the society for his “exceptional interdisciplinary contribution combining the fields of coherent interactions and adaptive optics, leading to multiple wavelength guidestars.”

David E. Pritchard will be recognized with OSA’s Max Born Award for his “creative application of light to new forms of spectroscopy, to manipulation and trapping of atoms, and for pioneering the new fields of atom optics and atom interferometry.” Pritchard is the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT.

The Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize will go to C. Randy Giles, director of the advanced photonics research department at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He was chosen for his “pioneering contributions to optical fiber communication including the engineering and application of the erbium-doped fiber amplifier, fiber-Bragg-grating stabilized pump lasers and [microelectromechanical systems] optical cross-connects.”

Richard A. Mathies, professor of biophysical and bioanalytical chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, will take home the Ellis R. Lippincott Award for his “innovative contributions to experimental and interpretive methods in resonance Raman spectroscopy, and the application of these methods to elucidate ultrafast dynamical processes in photochemistry and photobiology.” OSA, the Coblentz Society, and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy cosponsor this award.

Brian J. Orr, professor of molecular and optical physics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, will receive the William F. Meggers Award. He is being honored for “advancing molecular spectroscopy by experiment and theory on infrared- and Raman-ultraviolet double resonance, coherent Raman spectroscopy, cavity ringdown spectroscopy, photoelectron spectroscopy, nonlinear optics, and tunable coherent light sources.”

The Edgar D. Tillyer Award will go to John Krauskopf, visiting scholar in the Center for Neural Science at New York University, in recognition of his “inventive work in many aspects of vision, and especially for psychophysical and electrophysiological experiments that have changed the way post-receptoral and cortical color vision mechanisms are conceived and studied.”