SPIE Announces 2015 Award Recipients For Achievements In Optics And Photonics

Gold Medal of the Society goes to University of Pennsylvania professor Nader Engheta

Winners of awards recognizing outstanding technical achievements and service to the society have been announced by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. The annual awards program recognizes both individual and team technical accomplishments.

Winners of prestigious annual awards have been announced by the Awards Committee of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. The awards recognize outstanding individual and team technical accomplishments and meritorious service to the Society.

Award winners for 2015 are:

Gold Medal of the Society: Nader Engheta, University of Pennsylvania, for his transformative and groundbreaking contributions to optical engineering of metamaterials and nanoscale plasmonics, metamaterial-based optical nano circuits, and biologically-inspired optical imaging. The Gold Medal is the highest honor bestowed by SPIE.

Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award: Lihong Wang, Washington University in St. Louis, for his pioneering technical contributions and visionary leadership in the development and application of photo-acoustic tomography, photoacoustic microscopy and photon transport modeling.

A.E. Conrady Award: Richard C. Juergens, Raytheon Missile Systems, recognizing him as a leading authority in optical system design, optical component fabrication and testing, and training and mentoring of optical engineers, and instrumental in developing optimization techniques and tolerancing methods for optical designs.

Dennis Gabor Award: Kazuyoshi Itoh, Osaka University, for his eminent contribution to the development of incoherent holography and nonlinear optical microscopy through your pioneering work on coherence-based multispectral and 3D imaging, and nonlinear optical imaging and manipulations of biological and inorganic industrial materials.

George W. Goddard Award: Grady H. Tuell, Georgia Tech Research Institute, recognizing his foundational research and development in bathymetric lidar and data fusion; and his efforts to further advance airborne LIDAR remote sensing in other ways including real-time calculation of total propagated positioning error.

G.G. Stokes Award: Aristide Dogariu, CREOL, University of Central Florida, for his development of new theoretical concepts and innovative methods and techniques for understanding and measuring polarization properties of light-matter interaction.

Chandra S. Vikram Award in Optical Metrology: Guillermo H. Kaufmann, Istituto de Física Rosario (CONICET-UNR) for his contributions to speckle metrology and its applications in material science, experimental mechanics and nondestructive testing, and also for the development of novel fringe analysis methods.

Frits Zernike Award in Microlithography: Ralph R. Dammel, AZ Electronics Materials, for his significant contributions to the development of photoresist, anti-reflective coating, and directed self-assembly materials for semiconductor microlithography.

SPIE Early Career Achievement Award – Academic: Miriam Serena Vitiello, recognizing her outstanding results in research on semiconductor laser sources and electronic high frequency nanodetectors which have opened new frontiers in the Terahertz photonics and optoelectronics fields.

SPIE Early Career Achievement Award – Industry: Alan Lee, LongWave Photonics LLC, recognizing his pioneering research on stand-off distance real-time THz imaging. The locking-in differential imaging proposed in his work formed the basic working principle of several commercial THz imagers/cameras.

SPIE Educator Award: Virendra Mahajan, recognizing his sharing of knowledge in the area of optical imaging, aberrations, and wavefront analysis through his voluntary teaching of students and professionals and the writing of five excellent books.

SPIE Technology Achievement Award: Keith B. Doyle, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, for his outstanding contributions to integrated analysis of optical systems, incorporating in this analysis elements of optical, thermal, and structural engineering.

For future awards, members of the photonics community may nominate colleagues to recognize their outstanding achievements. Nominations may be made through 1 October of any given year and are considered active for three years from the submission date. Instructions and nomination forms are at www.spie.org/x1164.xml.

About SPIE
SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The Society serves nearly 256,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided more than $3.4M in support of education and outreach programs in 2014.