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Johnathan Davis, Byron Cocilovo win OSC outstanding student honors 06 June 2014
SPIE Student Members Johnathan Davis and Byron Cocilovo were recently recognized with outstanding student awards by the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences (OSC). In April, Davis was named OSC's Outstanding Senior and Cocilovo both its Outstanding Graduate Student and its Outstanding Teaching Assistant. In May, UA College of Engineering also recognized Davis as Outstanding Senior and Cocilovo as outstanding Teaching Assistant, honoring them as top performers throughout the engineering disciplines. In nominating Davis, SPIE Member and OSC professor Michael Nofziger noted that Davis founded the optics company Gemini Instruments before leaving high school. In 2004, he won the National Young Astronomer Award. By 2005, he was working for UA's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab on some of the world's largest telescopes, including the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope. Davis has won an SPIE scholarship, and is co-author on a paper that will be presented in the Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation session of the 2014 SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference this month. Adviser and SPIE Fellow Robert Norwood, who nominated Cocilovo for both OSC awards, called out Cocilovo's exceptional grades and work ethic, as well as his willingness to go beyond the call of duty to enrich the experiences of his students, colleagues and community. Cocilovo's research focuses on designing, fabricating and characterizing light-harvesting grating structures for photovoltaics and plasmonics. Read more in the OSC press release. |