Bahaa Saleh Named UCF Optics Dean, CREOL Director

Bahaa Saleh has been named dean of the University of Central Florida (UCF) College of Optics and Photonics and director of the UCF Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL). He will replace Eric Van Stryland, who intends to focus on his research in nonlinear optics, UCF said in a statement. The two will work together during the transition. UCF said Saleh's appointment will begin sometime in 2009. Saleh, a professor and chairman of the electrical and computer engineering department at Boston University (BU) since 1994 and co-director of its Quantum Imaging Laboratory, is deputy director of the National Science Foundation Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems. His research interests include statistical and quantum optics, optical communication and signal processing, nonlinear optics, photodetectors, image processing and vision. He has written Photoelectron Statistics and Fundamentals of Photonics and numerous articles and conference proceedings. He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Optical Society of America (OSA) from 1991 to 1997 and is currently editor-in-chief of Advances in Optics and Photonics. A member of the Boston University Photonics Center, Saleh is a fellow of OSA, IEEE and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Cairo University in 1966 and a PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1971. He was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1977 to 1994, and he has taught and conducted research at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, Kuwait University, the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the University of California at Berkeley, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Columbia University. Saleh was awarded the 1999 OSA Esther Hoffman Beller Award for his contributions to optical science and engineering education, the 2004 SPIE/BACUS award for photomask technology and the 2006 Kuwait Prize for optical science.