SPIE 2015 Awards Honor Achievements in Light-Based Technologies

BELLINGHAM, WA--(Marketwired - Mar 9, 2015) - 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 technical accomplishments and meritorious service to the society.

Recipients are:

Gold Medal of the Society: Nader Engheta, University of Pennsylvania, for contributions to optical engineering of metamaterials and nanoscale plasmonics, metamaterial-based optical nanocircuits, 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 pioneering contributions and visionary leadership in photoacoustic tomography, photoacoustic microscopy, and photon transport modeling.

A.E. Conrady Award: Richard Juergens, Raytheon Missile Systems, for leadership in optical system design, optical component fabrication and testing, development of optimization techniques and tolerancing methods, and training and mentoring of optical engineers.

Dennis Gabor Award: Kazuyoshi Itoh, Osaka University, for contributions to incoherent holography and nonlinear optical microscopy through 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 Tuell, Georgia Tech Research Institute, for foundational work in bathymetric lidar and data fusion, and advances in airborne lidar remote sensing including real-time calculation of total propagated positioning error.

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

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

Frits Zernike Award in Microlithography: Ralph Dammel, AZ Electronics Materials, for contributions in photoresist, anti-reflective coating, and directed self-assembly materials for semiconductor microlithography.

SPIE Early Career Achievement Award - Academic: Miriam Serena Vitiello, for research on semiconductor laser sources and electronic high frequency nanodetectors opening new frontiers in terahertz photonics and optoelectronics.

SPIE Early Career Achievement Award - Industry: Alan Lee, LongWave Photonics LLC, for pioneering work on stand-off distance real-time THz imaging enabling basic working principles for commercial THz imagers/cameras. 

SPIE Educator Award: Virendra Mahajan, for sharing knowledge in the area of optical imaging, aberrations, and wavefront analysis, as a volunteer teacher and author.

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

Members of the photonics community may nominate colleagues for SPIE awards through 1 October each year. Information at www.spie.org/x1164.xml.

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, and professional networking. SPIE provided more than $3.4 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2014.