2010 SPIE Fellows
Among the 62 new SPIE Fellows this year are 10 from Asia who were promoted for their service to SPIE and technical achievements in optics and photonics.
Among the 62 new SPIE Fellows this year are 10 from Asia: nine distinguished academic researchers and a lithography pioneer from Nikon who are recognized for scientific and technical achievements in optics and photonics and for their service to SPIE.
These 10 Fellows from China, Japan, Taiwan, and India have published thousands of innovative research papers in optomechatronics, silicon photonics, smart structures, photovoltaics, biophotonics, agri-photonics, nanophotonics, immersion lithography, liquid crystals, plasmonics, and other technologies. One is a member of the People’s Congress in China, another developed the first tunable liquid crystal laser, and a third is an educator and entrepreneur who co-founded a semiconductor factory in China. Three are deans of prestigious universities.
All active members of SPIE, they serve as referees and editorial board members on SPIE journals and are involved with the technical programs at SPIE conferences throughout the world.
SPIE Professional is highlighting the achievements of several groups of new SPIE Fellows throughout the year in both print and online. For a complete list of SPIE Fellows, go to spie.org/fellows.
For IR detectors and photovoltaics
JunHao Chu, who began a three-year appointment on the SPIE Board of Directors this year, is the director of the Shanghai Center for Photovoltaics and dean of the College of Information Science and Technology at East China Normal University (China). He also serves as a deputy to the National People’s Congress of China and a professor at the National Lab for Infrared Physics at the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics.
A specialist in IR detectors, semiconductor physics, and device technology who was symposium chair at Photonics Asia in 2007, Chu has helped to form and improve working relationships between SPIE and technical organizations in China.
Chu was elected to the Chinese National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and has published more than 300 papers and book chapters on narrow-gap semiconductors, ferroelectric thin films, optoelectronics, semiconductor device physics, and photovoltaics.
For micro- and nanophotonics
Chunlei Du, who has served as a referee for Optical Engineering and the Journal of Biomedical Optics and as a program committee member or session chair at several SPIE-sponsored conferences, is a professor at the Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu (China), designated a Key Laboratory of optical technology.
She has conducted extensive research on micro- and nanophotonics as well as on advancements in plasmonics, diffractive optics, lithography, and metamaterials. Du is responsible for many developments in the design of microlens arrays which have found use in adaptive optics, optical system measurement, and laser-beam quality measurement. One for Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors earned her an award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Her work in plasmonics includes development of subwavelength-structure imaging based on surface-wave effect and nanofabrication and sensing based on localized surface plasmonic structures. Du’s research in radiation control has resulted in high-performance compact photonic radiation devices such as antennas based on metamaterials created in both microwave and light regions.
Her idea for creating a non-period moving mask for a 3D microstructure with an irregular profile was also the basis for a new type of lithographic facility.
For LCD technology
A pioneer in the development of polymer-dispersed liquid crystals (PDLCs) and other LCD technologies, Andy Y.G. Fuh, dean of Science College at National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), has provided important service to SPIE as chair or program committee member of liquid crystal conferences at several SPIE meetings.
Fuh is also recognized for his work in switchable shutters, diffraction gratings, and other optical applications for PDLCs. He is an international leader in the physics of PDLC morphologies and structures under isotropic polymerization, the dynamics of photo-alignment of liquid crystals, and negative refraction based on the photonic crystals of PDLCs, which he was the first to demonstrate. Fuh has pioneered several novel LC devices and has also demonstrated for the first time tunable liquid crystal lasers and unusual optical phenomena such as super prism and conical scattering effects of photonic crystals formed in PDLCs.
For fiber, integrated optics, and education
Retired physics professor Ajoy Ghatak, who received the 2008 SPIE Educator Award for four decades of work at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, has been named an SPIE Fellow this year for his pioneering work on fiber and integrated optics and for his long service to SPIE as an instructor and a symposium, session, and conference chair.
Ghatak founded IIT’s optoelectronics research group in the mid-1970s to study theoretical guided-wave optics, and he has since authored or co-authored 15 books on optics, many of them textbooks. His role in educating new optics scientists spans many countries.
Ghatak’s contributions to optics include a powerful and simple matrix approach to analyzing absorbing, leaky, and nonlinear waveguides and quantum-well structures and the use of the modified Airy function (MAF) for analyzing optical waveguides. Both methodologies have been referred to as the Ghatak Method and are important to optical communication systems, fiber amplifiers, fiber lasers, and fiber sensors.
For smart materials and structures
Jinsong Leng, the organizing chair of two recent SPIE conferences in Asia on smart materials and nanotechnology in engineering, has long been active in the field of smart materials, sensors, and structures and electro-active polymers, most recently at SPIE Smart Structures/Non Destructive Evaluation in March.
Leng is the director of the Smart Materials and Structures Lab in the School of Astronautics at Harbin Institute of Technology in China, and his research has enabled many advances, including tactile displays and printers for people with visual impairments who use the Braille reading system. His other achievements include work in microwave photonic devices based on fiber Bragg gratings, thermoset shape-memory polymers, fiber-optic sensors, and active vibration controls of smart, composite structures for structural health monitoring.
For silicon and nanophotonics
Ching-Fuh Lin is a professor of electrical engineering at National Taiwan University in Taipei who has helped SPIE organize optical research conferences in Taiwan and is a frequent invited speaker at international conferences. He has conducted original work in silicon-based photonics, nanostructures for photonics, ultra-broadband superluminescent diodes, and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). These SOAs were used to construct lasers tunable over a range of 240 nm and achieve multichannel lasing.
He was the first to discover anti-competition between laser modes in dual-wavelength semiconductor lasers and was also first to show lasing phenomena such as threshold behavior and resonance modes from silicon at the silicon bandgap energy.
For optomechatronics
Yukitoshi Otani is honored for his pioneering research in the interdisciplinary field of optics and mechanics, optomechatronics, which has resulted in many important concepts and techniques for polarization engineering. Otani has served on numerous SPIE program committees for optomechatronics and interferometry conferences, including the interferometry session at SPIE Optics+Photonics where he will present his research in August on Uni-axial measurement of 3D surface profile by liquid crystal digital shifter.
His work extends across many fields including polarimetry, profilometry and interferometry, optical actuators and manipulators, Moire topography, and variable focus lenses. Otani has developed new methods for optically driving actuators, new measurement methods for 3D surface profiling, and a variable focus lens using liquid pressure for laser processing.
Otani, professor at the Center for Optical Research and Education (CORE) at Utsunomiya University (Japan), was previously with the Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.
For immersion lithography
Nikon Corp. manager Soichi Owa of Japan has been active for many years on the program committee for the optical microlithography conference at SPIE Advanced Lithography and serves on the editorial board for the SPIE Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS.
He has made important developments to immersion lithography and solid-state lasers, ranging from water-based 193-nm and oil-based 157-nm immersion lithography techniques to immersion-specific advances, such as investigating causes and remedies for defects in semiconductor manufacturing.
Owa has more than 32 patents (plus 36 pending) and received the 2005 Nikkei BP Technology Award for his efforts on argon fluoride (193 nm) immersion exposure technology.
For biomedical optics
Da Xing’s fundamental research in biomedical imaging has allowed important advances in bio-information detection and biomedical imaging. This includes improving functional photoacoustic imaging, studying single-molecule behavior imaging in living cells, and developing non-invasive real-time optical detection of metabolic information of crop plants in vivo.
Xing is director of the Laser Life Science Institute and dean of the College of Biophotonics at South China Normal University in Guangzhou, and he has worked extensively on developing fast photoacoustic imaging methods based on focused-control techniques and multi-element-array transducers. These techniques are used in early cancer detection, brain-function imaging, and photodynamic therapy of malignant tumor and laser-induced immunological responses. His lab has been designated a Key Lab by the Chinese Ministry of Education, one of only a few such high-level labs in China for biomedical optics and optical engineering.
Xing gave up a tenured faculty position in Japan in the mid 1990s to return to his native China where he has also worked in the area of agri-photonics. He has invented a detection method for plant photosynthesis based on quantitative measurement of delayed fluorescence and made other discoveries to improve plant harvest.
With SPIE, he has been an active contributor to conferences over the last 10 years, notably as program committee member for the Biophotonics and Immune Responses conference and the Optics in Health Care and Biomedical Optics conference.
For silicon and nanophotonics
Zhiping (James) Zhou is an optics and photonics educator in both China and the United States who has been instrumental in promoting and establishing optoelectronics research centers in China. He was also a co-founder and vice president for fabrication at a Chinese semiconductor company.
Zhou has been a key promoter of silicon photonics in China while also conducting groundbreaking research in optical data storage, binary optics, diffraction analysis and simulation, and integrated optoelectronics and computer simulation.
Zhou holds appointments at the Peking University School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, where he established the Silicon Photonics and Microsystem Lab, and Georgia Institute of Technology, where he helped develop a CMOS baseline process facility. He has also taught and developed optoelectronics programs at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China.
His service to SPIE has included chairing or being a member of program committees for several optics and photonics conferences in Asia.
For more information about the SPIE Fellows program, or to nominate a colleague for next year, go to spie.org/fellows.
Asia meetings
SPIE sponsors and/or co-sponsors several meetings in Asia each year. Upcoming meetings include:
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SPIE Asia-Pacific Remote Sensing, 10-15 October Incheon, Korea
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SPIE/COS Photonics Asia, 18-21 October Beijing, China
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Asia Communications and Photonics, 8-12 December Shanghai, China
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Photonics 2010, 11-15 December Guwahati, India
Fellows at Optics+PhotonicsThirteen new SPIE Fellows are scheduled to receive their Fellow certificates at SPIE Optics+Photonics in August.
They are: Juan Campos, Thomas Jackson, Thomas Karr, Paul LeVan, Ching-Fuh Lin, Hooman Mohseni, Iain Neil, Peter Nordlander, Yukitoshi Otani, Richard Paxman, Stanley Rotman, Niyazi Sariciftci, and Charles Townes. Neil will be the speaker at the Fellows luncheon.
Townes, who also receives the SPIE Gold Medal this year, will speak at the SPIE awards banquet on 4 August.
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