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04 October 2010
Alan E. Willner Receives 2010 Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Lyndsay Meyer
The Optical Society
+1.202.416.1435
lmeyer@osa.org
Alan E. Willner Receives 2010 Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award
WASHINGTON, October 4 —The Optical Society (OSA) has named Professor Alan E. Willner the winner of the 2010 Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award in honor of his work in optical communications. The award recognizes technical achievements in optical engineering and will be presented during the award ceremony at OSA’s annual meeting Frontiers in Optics (FiO) on October 25 in Rochester, NY, USA. Professor Willner will be recognized for technical advances in optical fiber communications technologies that have enabled major improvements in the performance and reliability of wavelength-division-multiplexed systems. He will also be honored for his excellence in education in optical fiber telecommunications.
“Alan Willner has been making important contributions to the optical engineering field for over 20 years,” said Elizabeth Rogan, OSA CEO. “He is well respected among his colleagues for his ground-breaking achievements in signal processing and optical communications, and OSA is proud to honor Dr. Willner for his pioneering achievements.”
Alan Willner is currently the Sample Chaired Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California as well as the Associate Director for the Center for Photonics Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 1988 and has since worked in many diverse professional capacities, including at AT&T Bell Labs and Bellcore. He has received many awards and honors for his research in optical communications and signal processing, including the International Fellowship of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering, the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellows Award, the Packard Foundation Fellowship, the Fulbright Senior Award, the OSA Leadership Award, and the Eddy Paper Award. Professor Willner has also served as President of the IEEE Photonics Society, Co-Chair of the OSA Science & Engineering Council, Co-Chair of CLEO and the OSA Annual Meeting, and Editor-in-Chief of Optics Letters and IEEE/OSA J. Lightwave Technology. His research has specifically focused on potential solutions for correcting optical impairments in high-capacity WDM fiber communication systems.
The Engineering Excellence Award was established in 1989 and has since been bestowed to 74 outstanding scientists and researchers in the field of optical engineering. The award was renamed in 2007 to honor Paul F. Forman and is sponsored by Zygo Corporation, Optical Research Associates, Cambridge Research & Instrumentation, Inc., Canon Inc. and individual contributors Gary and Carolyn Bjorklund, G. Michael Morris and Barbara Marks Forman.
For more information on the award or the nomination process, visit OSA’s Awards & Honors page.
About OSA
Uniting more than 106,000 professionals from 134 countries, the Optical Society (OSA) brings together the global optics community through its programs and initiatives. Since 1916 OSA has worked to advance the common interests of the field, providing educational resources to the scientists, engineers and business leaders who work in the field by promoting the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics. OSA publications, events, technical groups and programs foster optics knowledge and scientific collaboration among all those with an interest in optics and photonics. For more information, visit www.osa.org.
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