WASHINGTON, May 3 -- Attendees at the upcoming Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics/Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference (CLEO/QELS 2002) will have the opportunity to hear from industry leaders in the field of optics and photonics at this year's plenary and awards session. Among the notable speakers who will headline this year's plenary talks are Wolfgang Ketterle from MIT, Steven K. Korotky from Lucent, and Philip Russell from Bath University. CLEO/QELS 2000 will take place May 19-24, 2002 at the Long Beach Convention Center in Long Beach, Calif. The plenary and awards session will take place in the second-floor ballroom of the convention center Wednesday, May 22 at 8 a.m. Speaker information and presentation abstracts are listed below. The Optical Society of America), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Lasers & Electro-Optics Society and the American Physical Society are cosponsors of CLEO/QELS 2002. This year's conference will also feature a Nobel Tribute honoring the sponsors' combined 95 Nobel Laureate members. The tribute will mark the passage of the Nobel Centennial with a special display recognizing the contributions of these past and present Nobel Prize winners to the advancement of science and to the spectacular applications and future of the "science of light" in our daily lives. CLEO/QELS 2002 Plenary Speakers Philip Russell, "Photonic crystal fibers: A holey renaissance" -- Light is trapped at structural defects in the "crystalline" array of microscopic air channels running along a photonic crystal fiber. The large air: glass-refractive index difference -- and the ability to control its distribution in two dimensions -- permit greatly enhanced control of the guided modes. Applications are emerging in areas of laser science as diverse as frequency metrology, atom guiding and telecommunications. Russell is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Bath, where he heads the Optoelectronics Group. Previously he has worked in universities and research laboratories across Europe and in the USA. He has 25 years experience and over 300 publications, in many aspects of photonics and has pioneered developments in fiber Bragg gratings, photonic band gap materials, acousto-optic fiber devices, nonlinear optics and periodically poled materials. Steven Korotky, "Trends in Optical Components in Fiber Communications -- There is a future." What will we need to meet and manage capacity demand in backbone data and IP networks? Innovative technologies will provide higher performance at lower cost. Korotky is director for Advanced Optical Networking and Technology of Lucent Technologies' Optical Networking Business Group and has been actively engaged in the research and development of optical devices, systems and networks for optical communication since joining Bell Laboratories in 1980. He holds a number of patents and is co-author of many publications and several books, among them Optical Fiber Telecommunications III and IV. He is best known for researching, developing and introducing external modulation and pulse generation into high-speed fiber transmission systems deployed worldwide. Wolfgang Ketterle, "Bose-Einstein Condensates-Superfluid Gases" -- This talk will present Bose-Einstein condensates as a novel system for atomic physics and for many-body physics. At nanokelvin temperatures, a gas which is 100,000 times more dilute than air shows phenomena characteristic for a condensed matter system. Ketterle received a diploma (equivalent to a master's degree) from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and the Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich (1986). After postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics at the University of Heidelberg and at MIT, he joined the faculty of the physics department at MIT in 1993, where he is now the John D. MacArthur professor. He does experimental research in atomic physics and laser spectroscopy and focuses currently on Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Nobel Prize in Physics (2001), the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (1996), the Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society (1997), the Gustav-Hertz Prize of the German physical society (1997), the Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation (1998), the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics (1999), the Dannie-Heineman Prize of the Academy of Sciences, Göttingen, Germany (1999), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (2000). To register to attend CLEO/QELS 2002, please visit the Web site at www.cleoconference.org or fax your registration form to 708/344-4444.