Eli Yablonovitch is the Director Emeritus of the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), a multi-University Center headquartered at Berkeley, California, USA. He is a pioneer in the field of optoelectronics and photonic bandgap research and is regarded as a Father of the Photonic BandGap concept. The geometrical structure of the first experimentally realized Photonic bandgap is sometimes called "Yablonovite." He introduced the idea that strained semiconductor lasers could have superior performance – a concept that almost all semiconductor lasers now use. In photovoltaics, he introduced the 4(n squared) ("Yablonovitch Limit") light-trapping factor - used worldwide in commercial solar panels.

He received his PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University, USA. Yablonovitch's career has included work at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Harvard, Exxon and the University of California. He also founded and co-founded several companies.

He served on several of the Society's committees and was an editor of Optics Letters in the late 1980s.

Yablonovitch has received many awards and honors, including the R.W. Wood Prize and Adolf Lomb Medal. He is a Fellow of Optica and APS, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London.

In 2019, he was awarded the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Prize "for diverse and deep contributions to optical science including photonic crystals, strained semiconductor lasers, and new record-breaking solar cell physics."