SPIE President Katarina Svanberg was one of several award presenters who were kept busy with recognition activities at SPIE Photonics West.
BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA -- Top research in lasers, green photonics, biomedical optics, and other fields were recognized by awards made at SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco last month. Twenty-six new Fellows of the Society were also named. SPIE is promoting a total of 67 new Fellows in 2011 in recognition of their outstanding careers and service to the Society.
SPIE President Katarina Svanberg and Steve Eglash, chair of the new Green Photonics Virtual Symposium, named winners of awards in all four of the event's major topical areas. Authors in LASE, MOEMS-MEMS, OPTO, and BiOS requested consideration for Green Photonics awards in submitting their papers. Winners were:
'Young Investigator' awards
Two researchers each received PicoQuant Young Investigator Awards for the best oral presentations at the Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Imaging conference. The award is for presenters under the age of 35.
Daniel Aquino (Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie) was awarded a prize for "Optical switching and time-sequential coherent detection of markers through opposing lenses enables multicolor 3D-nanoscopy with 10-nm resolution of large intracellular volume" (7905-24).
Julie Biteen (University of Michigan) also won for "Live-cell single-molecule and superresolution imaging of proteins in bacteria" (7905-23).
A team of German researchers won the Ocean Optics Young Investigator Award for a paper given in the Colloidal Quantum Dots/Nanocrystals for Biomedical Applications conference. The paper was "Time-resolved and steady-state FRET spectroscopy on commercial biocompatible quantum dots," by David Wegner, Daniel Geissler, and Hans-Gerd Löhmannsröben of University of Potsdam and Niko Hildebrandt of Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Polymerforschung (7909-12).
Best papers
James Loudin of Stanford University received the Pascal Rol Award for best paper in Ophthalmic Technologies. Loudin presented a paper titled "Photovoltaic retinal prosthesis" (7885-37). The award was presented by Session Chair Fabrice Manns of the University of Miami. The award sponsor is Topcon Advanced Biomedical Imaging Lab, through the Pascal Rol Foundation.
At the BiOS symposium, four groups of researchers received awards sponsored by Seno Medical for best oral presentation and best poster presentation at the Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing Conference.
For best poster, two groups from Washington University in St. Louis won: Konstantin Maslov, Song Hu, and Lihong Wang for "Generation-2 optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy with improved sensitivity and scanning speed" (7899-112) and Adam Bauer, Ralph Nothdurft, Changhui Li, Lihong Wang, and Joseph Culver for "Quantitative high resolution photoacoustic spectroscopy by combining photoacoustic imaging with diffuse optical tomography" (7899-134).
Two groups from Europe each won best oral paper awards:
Sören Richter, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität-Jena, won first place in the Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics: Biomedical, Scientific, and Industrial Applications best paper competition for his presentation, "Breaking stress of glass welded with femtosecond laser pulses at high repetition rates" (7925-24). Kouhei Kimura, Utsunomiya University, won second place his presentation, "Holographic spatiotemporal lens (HSTL)" (7925-7) .
Accepted papers will be published in the SPIE Digital Library as soon as approved after the meeting, and in print volumes and digital collections. The SPIE Digital Library is the world's largest collection of optics and photonics literature, and a leading resource for scientific and patent research.
Student travel grants
Nineteen students received Newport Spectra-Physics Research Excellence Travel Awards: Serap Aksu, Salvatore Campione, Ludwig De Clercq, Sarah Erickson, George Fercana, Liang Gao, Melanie Gault, Eric Glowacki, Dag Heinemann, Ninad Ingle, Stephanie Kennedy, Jong-Ha Lee, Wonju Lee, Jheng-Jie Liu, Paul McNamara, Gilad Sharon, Shivaranjani Shivalingaiah, Tristan Swedish, and Bowen Wang.
The dragon's den: Biophotonics Startup Challenge
Nineteen aspiring entrepreneurs polished their pitching skills in a biophotonics start-up challenge before four volunteer judges. The top three received sponsorship from Newport Spectra-Physics to attend the University of California, Davis, Biomedical Engineering Entrepreneurship Academy as well as a travel stipend from SPIE. The five-day academy will help participants construct a business case, analyze markets, and develop a network of connections to help drive their new ventures.
The top winners were from U.S. universities:Honorable mention went to Jerome Lapointe (Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal), SPIE Member Michelle Xu (University of Toronto), SPIE Member Behnam Molavi (University of British Columbia), SPIE Member Babak Shadgan (University of British Columbia), and SPIE member Yuan Luo (MIT).
Judges were Sergey Egorov (Del Mar Photonics and Tech Coast Angels), Linda Smith (Ceres Technology), Adam Wax (Duke University), and Brandon Yee (Daylight Solutions).
New Fellows of the Society
The SPIE Fellows honors Society Members for significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging, for their service to the general optics community, and to SPIE in particular. More than 900 SPIE members have become Fellows since the Society's inception in 1955. Awards are made at SPIE events throughout the year. Those choosing to accept their awards at Photonics West included:
SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, was founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. Serving more than 180,000 constituents from 168 countries, the Society advances emerging technologies through interdisciplinary information exchange, continuing education, publications, patent precedent and career and professional growth. SPIE annually organizes and sponsors approximately 25 major technical forums, exhibitions and education programs in North America, Europe, Asia and the South Pacific, and supports scholarships, grants and other education programs around the world.
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