OSA Fellow Emmett N. Leith was born 12 March 1927 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He attended Wayne State University where he received a B.S. in Physics in 1949. He continued at Wayne State and received a Master’s degree in physics in 1952 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1978.

Leith was a pioneer of coherent optics in radar systems and is credited with developing modern holography in the early 1960s. His research began at the Radar Laboratory of the University of Michigan’s Willow Run Laboratory in 1952. Before holography, his research focused on synthetic aperture radar. In 1955, he joined the University of Michigan as a research assistant. He became a research associate in 1956, a research engineer in 1960, associate professor in 1965, and full professor in 1968.

Leith, along with Juris Upatnieks, displayed the world’s first 3-D hologram at an OSA conference in 1964.

He has received many awards including OSA's R. W. Wood Prize, William F. Meggers Award, and OSA's highest honor, the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus Quinn Prize “for contributions to modern holography, information processing, and electromagnetics." He also received the1960 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award and the 1969 Stuart Ballantine Medal. In 1979, he received the National Medal of Science from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

In 2006, OSA established The Emmett N. Leith Medal, in his honor to recognize seminal contributions to the field of optical information processing.