2014 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award

Jeremy Munday, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland (USA), is the recipient of the 2014 Early Career Achievement Award in recognition of his innovative experimental and theoretical work on photonic engineering for solar-energy devices and Casimir forces.

“Jeremy is an outstanding talent with a proven track record of accomplishment in fundamental and applied science,” said Harry Atwater of the California Institute of Technology. Munday has “the intellectual capacity, presence, and energy to define new scientific frontiers,” Atwater said, especially in renewable energy.

Munday’s seminal experiment, the first experimental demonstration of a repulsive Casimir force, was featured as a cover article in Nature in 2009. This led him and his colleagues to consider how this phenomenon could be applied to ultra-low- static friction devices and sensors and to consider how rotations and torques could be generated by quantum fluctuations between anisotropic materials.

That work has been cited over 450 times in peer-reviewed journals.

In the field of solar-energy conversion, Munday was one of the pioneers of incorporating photonic and plasmonic elements in photovoltaic converters.

Munday received the 2012 NASA Early Career Faculty Space Technology Research Award for creative applications of metamaterials to space technology, specifically in solar sails. Munday and Atwater were among authors receiving an SPIE Green Photonics Award at Photonics West in 2012 for a paper on renewable-energy generation.

Read more about SPIE annual awards.

SPIE presents several annual awards that recognize individual and team technical accomplishments in optics and photonics and service to the Society.

Nominations may be made through 1 October and remain active for three years from the submission date, except for the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award and the Goodman Book Writing Award.

Nominations must be accompanied by:

• Nomination form
• Citation stating the accomplishments of nominee
• Description of the significant aspects of nominee's career
• Curriculum vitae listing educational background, positions held, publications, awards, honors, activities, and offices held within SPIE
• At least two letters of reference, not from the nominator
  
  

SPIE President H. Philip Stahl will present the 2014 Society awards Wednesday, 20 August, at the annual awards banquet in San Diego, CA (USA).

Tickets to the 7:30 pm event cost $90 and can be purchased with registration or on site at SPIE Optics + Photonics.

• Have a question or comment about this article? Write to us at spieprofessional@spie.org.
• To receive a print copy of SPIE Professional, the SPIE member magazine, become an SPIE member.