AOE Plenary Presentations

We are pleased to confirm the following plenary speakers for AOE 2008. The plenary sessions will take place on Friday, 31 October 2008. The final schedule of presentations will be available in August 2008.

Title to be Announced

Rod C. Alferness, Chief Scientist, Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, USA

Rod C. Alferness is currently Chief Scientist, Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent.  Prior to this position, Rod was the Bell Laboratories Research Senior Vice President.  His previous position was the Bell Laboratories Optical Networking Research Senior Vice President. Rod also was the Chief Technical Officer and Advanced Technology and Architecture Vice-President of the Optical Networking Group, Lucent Technologies.  Prior to that role, he was head of the Photonics Networks Research Department of Lucent Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey.

Rod joined Bell Labs in 1976 after receiving a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan where his thesis research, under the supervision of Professor Emmett Leith, concerned optical propagation in volume holograms.  His early research at Bell Labs included the demonstration of novel waveguide electro-optic devices and circuits - including switch/modulators, polarization controllers, tunable filters - and their applications in high capacity lightwave transmission and switching systems. This research led to the early development of titanium diffused lithium niobate waveguide modulators that are now deployed as the high-speed signal-encoding engine in fiber optic transmission systems around the world.  Dr. Alferness has also made contributions in photonic integrated circuits in InP, including widely tunable lasers, as well as in photonic switching systems and reconfigurable WDM (wavelength-division-multiplexed) optical networks.  In the mid-90’s, he was an originator and the Bell Labs Program Manager for the DARPA funded MONET project which demonstrated the feasibility of wavelength routed optical networks that are now being implemented for both backbone and metro networks. Dr. Alferness has authored over 100 papers, holds 35 patents and has authored five book chapters. 

Dr. Alferness is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.  He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS).  Dr. Alferness received the 2005 IEEE Photonics Award.  He has served as an elected member of the LEOS AdCom and was the President of IEEE LEOS in 1997.  He was General Co-Chair of the 1994 Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC’94).   Dr. Alferness has served as Associate Editor for Optics Letters and for Photonic Technology Letters.  He has served on many IEEE and OSA committees, including fellows and awards committees.  Dr. Alferness also currently serves on the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) Executive Management Committee.   He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE and OSA-sponsored Journal of Lightwave Technology from 1995-2000.  He served as an elected member of the Optical Society of America Board of Directors from 2001-2003 and is currently the president-elect of OSA.

Progress of GaN-based Nonpolar/Semipolar Visible Light Emitting Devices

Shuji Nakamura, Professor, Materials Department, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA

Shuji Nakamura was born on May 22, 1954 in Ehime, Japan. He obtained B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tokushima, Japan in 1977, 1979, and 1994, respectively. He joined Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd in 1979. In 1988, he spent a year at the University of Florida as a visiting research associate. In 1989 he started the research of blue LEDs using group-III nitride materials. In 1993 and 1995 he developed the first group-III nitride-based blue/green LEDs. He also developed the first group-III nitride-based violet laser diodes (LDs) in 1995. He has received a number of awards, including: the Nishina Memorial Award (1996), MRS Medal Award (1997), IEEE Jack A. Morton Award, the British Rank Prize (1998) and Benjamin Franklin Medal Award (2002). He was elected as the member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2003. Also, he received the Millennium Technology Prize in 2006. Since 2000, he is a professor of Materials Department of University of California Santa Barbara. He holds more than 100 patents and has published more than 200 papers in this field.

Laser Spectroscopy Applied to the Environmental and Medical Fields

Sune Svanberg, Head of the Atomic Physics Division, Lund University and Director of the Lund Laser Centre, Sweden

An overview of applied laser-based diagnostics as pursued at the Atomic Physics Division, Lund University, is given. The fields of application range from environmental monitoring including cultural heritage assessment to biomedical applications. General  aspects of laser-based methods are non-intrusiveness, high spectral and spatial resolution, and data production in real-time. Different applications are frequently generically very similar irrespective of the particular context, which however, decides the spatial and temporal scales as well as the size of the optics employed. Thus, volcanic plume mapping by lidar and optical mammography are two manifestations of the same principle, as is fluorescence imaging of a human bronchus by an endoscope and the scanning of a cathedral using a fluorescence lidar system. Recent applications include remote laser-induced break-down spectroscopy (LIBS) and gas monitoring in scattering media (GASMAS).

Sune Svanberg is Head of the Atomic Physics Division, Lund University, and director of the Lund Laser Centre, Sweden. He got his PhD in optical resonance spectroscopy in 1972 from Goteborg University, Sweden, where he stayed on till 1980, when he moved to Lund University. He spent research periods at the Technical University Berlin, Columbia University, Stanford University and MIT. His research field is basic and applied laser spectroscopy, presently with the emphasis on environmental and medical applications. He has well over 500 scientific papers, several patents and helped in the formation of several spin-off companies. He is a member of several academies including the Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, where he for 10 years served on the Nobel Committee for Physics. He has many prizes and award including the Quantum Electronics Award of the EPS, the Azko-Nobel Science Award, the Willis E. Lamb Medal and the Celsius Medal. He is honorary doctor or professor at several universities including Jilin University, Harbin Institute of Technology and Zhejiang University. He is also Einstein Professor with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He served on the Board of Directors of the Optical Society of America, and is presently on the Board of the Swedish Research Council.

Applications of Optics in Solar Energy Industries

Dr. Zhengrong Shi, Chairman of the Board of Directors, CEO, Suntech Power Holdings Co., Ltd., China

Dr. Zhengrong Shi is Suntech’s founder, chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer. Prior to founding Suntech in 2001, he was a research director and executive director of Pacific Solar Pty., Ltd., an Australian PV company engaged in the commercialization of next-generation thin film technology. From 1992 to 1995, he was a senior research scientist and the leader of the Thin Film Solar Cells Research Group in the Centre of Excellence for Photovoltaic Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Australia, the only government-sponsored PV industry research center in Australia.

Dr. Shi holds 11 patents in PV technologies and has published a number of articles and papers in PV-related scientific magazines and at conferences. Dr. Shi received a bachelor's degree in optical science from Chang Chun University of Science and Technology in China in 1983, a master's degree in laser physics from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1986, and a Ph.D degree in electrical engineering from the University of New South Wales in Australia in 1992.

Awards and Milestones

October 2007 – Dr. Shi was named one of TIME magazine's 2007 "Heroes of the Environment”

September 20, 2007 – Dr. Shi was awarded selected as the Corporate Citizen of the Year for his contribution to the development of the solar industry at the China Business Leaders Awards 2007

August 8, 2006 – Dr. Shi was appointed as member of advisory board of NYSE.

May 25, 2006 – Dr. Shi was awarded the “Best Entrepreneur Prize” by the Southern California Asian Society.

December 14, 2005 – Suntech successfully completed its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to become China’s first private high-tech company to list on a U.S. stock exchange, and the highest market value PV pure play company in the world.

October 2005 – Dr Shi was awarded the “PV-SEC Prize” at the International Photovoltaic Science and Engineering Conference in recognition of Dr. Shi’s contribution to the international PV industry.