Member News Briefs

• SPIE Fellow Wei R. Chen, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Central Oklahoma, has been named Master’s Universities and Colleges Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Chen led the development of Oklahoma's first and only undergraduate program in biomedical engineering.

• Richard Crocombe of Thermo Fisher Scientific and Jason Eichenholz of Ocean Optics were among the featured presenters at SPIE Spectroscopy Technology+Applications in Boston (USA) in November.

• SPIE Fellow Christopher Dainty, chair of applied physics and founder of the Applied Optics Group at the National University of Ireland in Galway, has been elected vice president of the OSA.

• SPIE Fellow and Board Member James Grote, principal electronics research engineer at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab and symposium chair at SPIE OPTO 2009 (Part of Photonics West), was named a 2008 Fellow of AFRL. Grote has worked at AFRL for 30 years and is a leader in several areas such as laser gyros, nonlinear electro-optic sensor materials and devices, optical interconnects and optical lithography, and DNA-based materials and devices. He has worked on subsurface fractures on mirror substrates, and he developed optical interconnects for communications networks which are now part of parallel high speed transceivers for military information systems. He also invented the technology for conductive polymer claddings for nonlinear optic polymer electro-optic modulators, resulting in a 10-fold improvement in the electro-optic coefficient.  More

• Nakhiah Goulbourne, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech (USA), has won a Faculty Early Career Development Award of $400,000 from the National Science Foundation.

• SPIE members Maya Gupta and Brian Lail are among 67 scientists receiving 2007 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. Gupta is assistant professor of electrical engineering and adjunct assistant professor of applied mathematics at the University of Washington. Lail is assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology. Gupta is scheduled to present on "Joint deconvolution and imaging," at the January 2009 IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging meeting in San Jose, CA.

• Akio Ikesue of World Lab (Japan) has received the 2008 Otto Schott Research Award for his pioneering work with optically transparent polycrystalline ceramics, with which he created the field of polycrystalline ceramic lasers.

• David Markle, retired vice president and CTO of Ultratech (USA), received the BACUS Lifetime Achievement Award at SPIE Photomask Technology for his contributions to advanced photolithography systems used in semiconductors. Markle said he planned to donate the cash honorarium that comes with the award to a colleague who has taught physics in Bhutan, Uganda and elsewhere.

• Claire Max, an adaptive optics pioneer and astrophysicist from University of California at Santa Cruz and a new SPIE Fellow, will receive Princeton University’s James Madison Medal during Princeton’s Alumni Day activities in New Jersey (USA) 21 February.

• Jacobus (Jim) Oschmann, a new SPIE Fellow, has been named vice president and general manager of Ball Aerospace & Technologies' Antenna & Video Technologies group. Oschmann will lead the strategy, acquisition, and execution of programs for tactical defense needs that apply antenna, radio frequency, and video technology.

• SPIE Fellow Vladislav Panchenko, president of the SPIE Russia Chapter from 1996 to 2005, is the new president of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. The RFBR provides financial support on a competitive basis to individual scientists and research teams, enabling them to select research topics independently, to set up academic teams, and to concentrate resources on the most promising research projects. Panchenko is a leader in high power CO2 laser research, medical physics, smart medical laser systems for oncology and general surgery and laser information technologies for material treatment and biomedical applications.  

• Mario J. Paniccia, an Intel Fellow who will participate in an industry perspectives panel at SPIE Photonics West 2009, has been named Scientist of the Year by R&D Magazine, in recognition of his work in the area of silicon photonics.

• George C. Schatz, professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, has been named winner of the 2008 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for theory in advances in nanotechnology. Schatz has published three books and more than 500 journal articles in theoretical and computational chemistry. He was cited for sophisticated modeling and optimization of the dip pen nanolithography method of nanofabrication and for his explanation of plasmon effects in metallic nanodots.

• Gary Sullivan of Microsoft, a new SPIE Fellow, and a team of international experts won their second Emmy Award for developing the H.264/MPEG4-AVC video standard.

• Clemson University in South Carolina (USA) has dedicated the Charles H. Townes Laboratories for Optical Science and Engineering to the man whose research led to the development of the laser. Townes was a co-recipient of the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics.

• SPIE Member John Werner, professor in the University of California Davis Health System Eye Center, has received the Lighthouse International Pisart Vision Award for his contributions to research on vision science

• Former SPIE Thailand Chapter officer Joewono Widjaja of Suranaree University of Technology was honored with ICO’s Galileo Galilei Medal.

The extensive SPIE Optics Library collected by members of the former SPIE Russia Chapter has a new, permanent home at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. Oleg Krokhin, director of the N.G. Basov Institute of Quantum Radiophysics at Lebedev, announced the agreement was reached through discussions with Edmund Akopov, executive director of the former SPIE Russia Chapter. The library includes Proceedings of SPIE and SPIE journals along with books and monographs from SPIE Press. More

A research team led by Shawn-Yu Lin of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA) has developed an antireflective coating for solar panels that boosts the amount of sunlight that can be harvested and allows those panels to absorb light at nearly any angle.