19 March 2009

Corning Student Paper Competition Finalists Announced

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Lyndsay Meyer
The Optical Society
+1.202.416.1435
lmeyer@osa.org

Corning Student Paper Competition Finalists Announced

WASHINGTON, March 19—The OSA Foundation, and Corning Incorporated today announced the finalists for the Corning Outstanding Student Paper Competition. The winners will be presented during this year’s Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) held March 22-26 in San Diego.

The seven Corning Outstanding Student Paper Competition finalists were selected from a record 425 student paper submissions. The finalists will present their research at OFC/NFOEC and will be judged by the conference general chairs and program chairs based on innovation, research excellence and author presentation skills. The grand-prize winner will receive $1,500 and two papers of honorable mention will receive $1,000 each during the post-deadline paper session at OFC/NFOEC on Thursday, March 26. Submissions were reviewed and scored by the OFC/NFOEC technical program committee and finalists were selected based on standard OFC/NFOEC paper review criteria.

“Every year the Corning Outstanding Student Paper Competition draws submissions from some of the most promising students in optical communications and networking, and this year is no different,” said Biswanath Mukherjee of the University of California at Davis and one of this year’s OFC/NFOEC technical program chairs. “These students have an understanding of the field far beyond their years and to recognize their work with this award is an honor for the committee.”

Finalists for the Corning award are:

• Mohammad Alfiad, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
  Paper: 111-Gb/s POLMUX-RZ-DQPSK Transmission over LEAF: Optical Versus Electrical Dispersion Compensation

• Cleitus Antony, University College Cork, Ireland
  Paper: SOA Based Upstream Packet Equalizer in 10Gb/s Extended-Reach PONs

• Jeffrey Lee, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
  Paper: Discrete Multitone Modulation for High-Speed Data Transmission over Multimode Fibers Using 850-nm VCSEL

• Quoc Thai Nguyen, FOTON-ENSSAT, France
  Paper: 16x2.5 Gbit/s Downstream Transmission in Colorless WDM-PON Based on Injection-Locked Fabry-Perot Laser Diode Using a Single Quantum Dash Mode-Locked Fabry-Perot Laser as Multi-Wavelength Seeding Source

• Mamoru Takagi, University of Tokyo, Japan
  Paper: 400Gb/s Hybrid Optical Switching Demonstration Combining Multi-Wavelength OPS and OCS with Dynamic Resource Allocation

• Ming-Chun Tien, University of California at Berkeley, USA
  Paper: Optofluidic Assembly of InGaAsP Microdisk Lasers on Si Photonic Circuits with Submicron Alignment Accuracy

• Bo Zhang, University of Southern California, USA
  Paper: Polarization-Based Fast-Swept Optical Spectrum Analyzer

About Corning Incorporated
Corning Incorporated (www.corning.com) is the world leader in specialty glass and ceramics. Drawing on more than 150 years of materials science and process engineering knowledge, Corning creates and makes keystone components that enable high-technology systems for consumer electronics, mobile emissions control, telecommunications and life sciences. Our products include glass substrates for LCD televisions, computer monitors and laptops; ceramic substrates and filters for mobile emission control systems; optical fiber, cable, hardware & equipment for telecommunications networks; optical biosensors for drug discovery; and other advanced optics and specialty glass solutions for a number of industries including semiconductor, aerospace, defense, astronomy and metrology.

About the OSA Foundation
The OSA Foundation was established in 2002 to support philanthropic activities that help further the Optical Society's (OSA) mission by concentrating its efforts on programs that advance youth science education, provide optics and photonics education to underserved populations, provide career and professional development resources  and support awards & honors that recognize technical and business excellence. The grants funded by the OSA Foundation are made possible by the generous donations of its supporters as well as the dollar-for-dollar match by OSA. The Foundation is exempt from U.S. federal income taxes under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and is a public charity. To learn more about the OSA Foundation or to find out how to donate, please visit www.osa-foundation.org or email foundation@osa.org.

About OFC/NFOEC
Since 1979, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC) has been the annual forum for those in the optical communications field to network and share research and innovations. In 2004, OFC joined forces with the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) creating the largest and most comprehensive international event for optical communications. By combining an exposition of 550 companies with a unique program of peer-reviewed technical programming and focused educational sessions, audiences from service providers, manufacturers, network providers and more participate in OFC/NFOEC for the latest advances in optical communications.

OFC/NFOEC, www.ofcnfoec.org, is managed by the Optical Society (OSA) and co-sponsored by OSA, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Communications Society (IEEE/ComSoc) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (IEEE/LEOS). Acting as a non-financial technical co-sponsor is Telcordia Technologies, Inc.