IEEE Photonics Society Names Award Recipients

The IEEE Photonics Society named the recipients of its Society Career Awards, as well as recipients of its Laser Instrumentation Award and its Industry Achievement Award. Issued by the Photonics Society Joint Awards Committee, the Society Career Awards are comprised of the Aron Kressel Award, the Engineering Achievement Award, the Quantum Electronics Award, and the William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award.

Aron Kressel Award

The 2024 Aron Kressel Award went to Mona Jarrahi, professor and Northrop Grumman Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California Los Angeles in recognition of her contributions to the development of ultrafast electronic and optoelectronic devices and integrated systems for terahertz, infrared, and millimeter-wave sensing, imaging, computing, and communication by using plasmonics, novel optical materials, and quantum structures.

Mona Jarrahi. Courtesy of IEEE.

Jarrahi appeared as a guest in the fifth season of Photonics Media’s All Things Photonics podcast.

Engineering Achievement Award

In recognition of his work in silicon photonic waveguide devices, including the invention of metamaterial waveguides and the advancement of subwavelength integrated photonics technology, Pavel Cheben was awarded the 2024 Engineering Achievement Award. Cheben is a principal research officer at the National Research Council of Canada. He is also an honorary professor at the University of Malaga and an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa, the University of Toronto, Carleton University, McMaster University, and the University of Zilina.

Quantum Electronics Award

The Quantum Electronics Award was issued to Alexey Gorshkov for contributions to understanding, design, and control of interacting quantum systems, with applications including quantum computers, sensors, and networks. Gorshkov is a staff physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and leads a research group at the University of Maryland, where he is a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science.

William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award

The William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award recipient is Andrea Alù for seminal contributions to the field of photonic metamaterials and their applications. Alù is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), the Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, the founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and a professor of electrical engineering at the City College of New York.

Alù is credited with a number of discoveries, including the first experimental demonstration of a 3D electromagnetic cloak, of nonreciprocal phenomena in magnet-free metamaterials, of electromagnetic time reflections, and of extreme nonlinearities in quantum-engineered metasurfaces.

Laser Instrumentation Award

Bob Alfano was awarded the Laser Instrumentation Award for the discovery of supercontinuum light source as an enabling technology for diverse applications and tunable Cr4 and Cr3 lasers. Alfano is a Distinguished professor at the City College of New York and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where he is the founding director of the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers. Alfano is a member of Photonics Media’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Bob Alfano. Courtesy of IEEE.

Alfano’s research has primarily focused on ultrafast and steady state spectroscopy and optical properties of materials by direct measurements of optical phonon, vibrations, spin relaxation time, hot carrier effects, inter valley scattering in semiconductors, and decay routes of vibrations in organic liquids. In addition, he investigated polaritons in GaAs and polariton role in precursor propagation in random walk antennae.

Industry Achievement Award

Waguih Ishak was named as the recipient of the IEEE Industry Achievement Award “for enduring, transformational, and strategic global leadership in the development, promotion, and introduction of photonic products including commercial VCSELs and the computer laser mouse.”

Ishak is an adjunct Professor at Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering. During his career at Corning Incorporated, he established the Corning West Technology Center in Palo Alto where he led research on displays, interconnects, and sensors. At Corning R&D Corporation, his work focused on photonics, optoelectronics, high speed electronics, and MEMS, as well as investigating computational techniques for material discovery.