SPIE Fellow Akhlesh Lakhtakia of Pennsylvania State University, a pioneer in the development of sculptured thin films for applications in solar cells, biosensors, forensic science, and biomedicine, is the recipient of Sigma Xi's 2016 Walston Chubb Award for Innovation.
The award from the international honor society of science and engineering recognizes creativity in science and engineering. It comes with a $4,000 honorarium and an invitation to give the Walston Chubb Award Lecture at Sigma Xi's annual meeting in November.
Lakhtakia is the Charles Godfrey Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State and received the 2010 SPIE Technology Achievement Award for conceptualization and development of sculptured thin films and his characterization of them as nanoengineered metamaterials. He has also developed the principles of frequency-domain electromagnetics in isotropic chiral materials.
He has published over 200 papers with SPIE on nanostructured thin films, light scattering, nanophotonics, biomimicry, and anisotropic and bianisotropic materials and was the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Nanophotonics. He has also edited three SPIE Press Milestone Series collections on nanotechnology theory and modeling, linear optical composite materials, and natural optical activity; organized and chaired numerous conferences on nanophotonics; and is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Sculptured Thin Films: Nanoengineered Morphology and Optics and Nanotechnology: A Crash Course.
Lakhtakia is a coauthor of four papers to be presented 31 August at the Nanoscience + Engineering symposium at SPIE Optics + Photonics in San Diego, CA (USA).
He has doctoral degrees from University of Utah and Banaras Hindu University.
More information and a video about the award
