OSA Names Recipients of its 2021 Awards

The Optical Society announced 17 recipients of the 2021 OSA awards and medals. The society will recognize a total of 23 awardees throughout the year for their achievements. Among those honored this year are the first women to win the Max Born Award, the C.E.K. Mees Medal, and the John Tyndall Award. The award recipients follow.

Esther Hoffman Beller Medal

Nicholas Massa, Springfield Technical Community College, United States

For outstanding leadership in photonics technician education, including the development and dissemination of innovative educational materials.

Max Born Award

Anne L’Huillier, Lund University, Sweden

For pioneering work in ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics, realizing and understanding high harmonic generation and applying it to time-resolved imaging of electron motion in atoms and molecules.

Stephen D. Fantone Distinguished Service Award

Anthony M. Johnson, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), United States

For decades of principled leadership and steadfast service to The Optical Society and to the optics community, and especially for serving as a tireless ambassador for OSA.

Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award

Arjun Yodh, University of Pennsylvania, United States

For pioneering research on optical sensing in scattering media, especially diffuse optical and correlation spectroscopy and tomography, and for advancing the field of biophotonics through mentorship.

Joseph Fraunhofer Award / Robert M. Burley Prize

Zeev Zalevsky, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

For significant contributions to the field of optical superresolution including the invention of many novel concepts bypassing the Abbe limit of diffraction and the geometric limits set by the sensor.

Nick Holonyak Jr. Award

Martin D. Dawson, University of Strathclyde and Fraunhofer, United Kingdom

For wide-ranging contributions to the development and application of III-V semiconductor devices, especially gallium-nitride micro-LEDs and optically pumped semiconductor lasers.

Robert E. Hopkins Leadership Award

Pierre Chavel, Institut d’Optique, France

For outstanding support and promotion of optics throughout Europe, and exceptional leadership in institutions and scientific societies such as OSA, SPIE, ICO, EOS, and SFO.

Emmett N. Leith Medal

Bahram Javidi, University of Connecticut, United States

For exceptional innovation and transformative technological impact on the field information optics, including pioneering contributions to digital holography for life sciences, information security, optical sensing, and processing of photon-starved scenes.

Ellis R. Lippincott Award (presented with the Coblentz Society and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy)

Rohit Bhargava, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States

For contributions to the fundamental physics and instrument engineering of mid-IR microscopy and its applications to medical imaging.

Adolph Lomb Medal

Laura Waller, University of California, Berkeley, United States

For important contributions to the advancement of computational microscopy and its applications.

C.E.K. Mees Medal

Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, University of Queensland, Australia

For pioneering innovations in the transfer of optical angular momentum to particles, using sculpted light for laser manipulation on atomic, nano-, and microscales to generate fundamental insight and provide powerful probes to biomedicine.

William F. Meggers Award

Keith Nelson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

For expanding the horizons of impulsive stimulated Raman scattering (ISRS) to the generation of intense tunable terahertz pulses, thus establishing new transient-grating techniques for a more effective application of time-domain coherent nonlinear spectroscopy in the study of condensed phase molecular dynamics.

David Richardson Medal

Majid Ebrahim-Zadeh, ICFO: The Institute of Photonic Sciences, and ICREA: Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, Barcelona, Spain

For contributions to the advancement of nonlinear optical technology and commercial development of cutting-edge optical parametric oscillators.

Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award

Rengmao Wu, Zhejiang University, China

For achievements in theory and computational methods for freeform illumination optics.

Edgar D. Tillyer Award

David H. Brainard, University of Pennsylvania, United States

For groundbreaking experimental and theoretical contributions to our understanding of how the visual system resolves the ambiguities inherent in sensory signals to produce a stable percept of object color.

Charles Hard Townes Medal

Mikhail Lukin, Harvard University, United States

For his pioneering theoretical and experimental contributions to quantum nonlinear optics and quantum information science and technology, and for the development and application of nanoscale quantum systems for sensing.

R. W. Wood Prize

Tobias Kippenberg, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

For pioneering contributions to the realization of chip-scale optical frequency combs.