WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 -- The Optical Society of America (OSA) announced that Michael G. Littman and Rene-Jean Essiambre will receive its 2005 Engineering Excellence Awards and that Joyce Poon will receive the 2005 OSA-Dekker 
Foundation Student Scholarship. The three will be honored at the plenary and awards meeting during the Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science conference, to be held Oct. 16-20 in Tucson, Ariz.
Littman developed the grazing incidence tunable laser and subsequent improvements, including a geometrical scanning mechanism that allows for continuous single-mode tuning with one moving element. He is a professor with and associate chair of the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at Princeton University.
Essiambre has made discoveries and seminal contributions to the field of nonlinear propagation in fibers and the development of dispersion maps used in commercially deployed lightwave communication systems. He is a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories.
Joyce Poon is a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, where she is researching slow-light propagation in coupled-resonator optical waveguides (CROWs) and polymer microring resonator devices.
The OSA-Dekker Foundation Scholarship is for $10,000 and is bestowed every other year to a graduate student in photonics or optical engineering. The criteria for selecting the winner are an applicant’s GPA, resume, reference letters and a personal essay.
The Engineering Excellence Awards recognize technical achievements in optical engineering by individual(s) or teams. Nominations are solicited in products, engineering publication, process, software, patents, engineering education, contributions to society, engineering management and furthering public appreciation of optical engineering.
For more information, visit: www.osa.org