SPIE Member Zhaowei Liu, an assistant professor at University of California, San Diego, is one of five photonics researchers receiving a Young Investigator award from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
The award will fund his research in ultrafast blue and green LEDs for underwater optical wireless communication.
Liu, whose interdisciplinary research bridges the areas of nanoscale photonics, nanostructured materials, and plasmonics as well as their potential applications in optoelectronics and the biological sciences, teaches in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Programs at UCSD.
He serves on the program committee for the Unconventional Imaging and Wavefront Sensing conference at SPIE Optics + Photonics, to be held 25-29 August in San Diego.
The Young Investigator Program seeks to identify and support academic scientists and engineers who are in their first or second full-time tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent academic appointment and who show exceptional promise for doing creative research. The program aims to attract outstanding university faculty members to the Department of Navy's research program, support their research, and encourage their teaching and research careers.
The other photonics researchers include Sasan Fathpour of University of Central Florida; Kenan Gundogdu of North Carolina State University; Pablo Jarillo-Herrero from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Michael Rose of University of Texas at Austin.
More than $8 million will be distributed to this year's recipients, who were chosen from a field of 310 candidates.
