Fujimoto Honored With Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award

James Fujimoto, Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been awarded the SPIE Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award, in recognition of his pioneering research in Optical Coherent Tomography and its development as a clinical tool. 

"Jim's innovation, scholarly activities, professional service, entrepreneurial efforts, and impact on the field of biomedical optics typifies the spirit of this award, and reflects the seminal changes that Britton Chance made during his lifetime," said Stephen A. Boppart, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. "Few researchers in the world today have had such a profound impact as a result of their technological work that has literally changed our field, changed the way we practice medicine, and directly improved the lives of perhaps hundreds of thousands of patients (considering ophthalmology and cardiology)."

Fujimoto is a longtime Chair of the SPIE BiOS Symposium, serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Biomedical Optics, and was recently elected to serve a three-year term on the SPIE Board of Directors. An SPIE Fellow, he holds numerous patents, has written for countless publications and has been honored with many awards, including the Carl Zeiss Research Award (2011), and National Academy of Sciences (2006).

The Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award is presented annually, to honor contributions to optical methods and devices that have significant promise to accelerate or have already facilitated new discoveries in biology or medicine.

Fujimoto will receive the award on 2 February during the BiOS Hot Topics session at SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco.

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 225,000 constituents from approximately 150 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional growth, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $2.7 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2011.