Optical Society Of America Honors Three In Optical Engineering

Washington, DC - The Optical Society of America announced that Michael G. Littman and René-Jean Essiambre are the 2005 Engineering Excellence Awards winners and Joyce Poon is the 2005 OSA-Dekker Foundation Student Scholarship recipient. All three will be honored at the joint Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science Plenary and Awards Ceremony on October 17, 2005 in Tucson, Arizona.

"This year's Engineering Excellence Award winners are true leaders in optical engineering today," said Christopher Doerr, chair of the Engineering Excellence Award Selection Committee. "Both of them have made contributions that have helped carry the field forward."

Littman will receive an Engineering Excellence Award for the development of the grazing incidence tunable laser and subsequent improvements including a geometrical scanning mechanism that allows for continuous single mode tuning with one moving element. He currently is a professor at Princeton University.

Essiambre was chosen to receive an Engineering Excellence Award for discoveries and seminal contributions to the field of nonlinear propagation in fibers and the development of dispersion maps used in commercially deployed lightwave communication systems. He is currently a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) of Bell Laboratories.

"The OSA-Dekker Foundation Scholarship recognizes the importance of supporting promising graduates in the photonics and optical engineering fields," said Katherine Creath, chair of this year's Dekker selection committee. "This year's recipient is poised to become one of the field's leaders in the near future and we are happy to help her reach her full potential."

Joyce Poon, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology will receive the 2005 OSA-Dekker Foundation Scholarship. Poon's current research is on slow light propagation in Coupled-Resonator Optical Waveguides (CROWs) and polymer microring resonator devices.

Each year, OSA bestows the Engineering Excellence awards to increase the visibility of optical engineers. The awards recognize technical achievements in optical engineering by individual(s) or teams.

The OSA-Dekker Foundation Scholarship is for $10,000 and is bestowed every other year to a graduate student in photonics or optical engineering. The criteria for selecting the winner are an applicant's GPA, resume, reference letters and a personal essay.

SOURCE: OSA