Student Awards, Grants, Scholarships & Fellowships
OSA and the OSA Foundation support a wide range of student awards, grants, scholarships and fellowships. Student members are encouraged to participate in these worthwhile programs.
AWARDS
Corning Outstanding Student Paper Award
This award, endowed by Corning Incorporated and administered by the OSA Foundation, recognizes innovation, research excellence and presentation abilities in optical communications. All students submitting their papers during the regular “call for papers” process for OFC/NFOEC are eligible for the competition. Please see the Submission section of www.ofcnfoec.org for complete details.
Funded by an endowment from Milton and Rosalind Chang, this program provides 10 grants of up to $1,000 each to students who travel to present papers at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) or the OSA Annual Meeting/Frontiers in Optics (FiO).
Maiman Student Paper Award
This award, endowed by HRL Laboratories, LLC, IEEE-LEOS and APS Division of Laser Science and administered by the OSA Foundation, honors Theodore Maiman for his amazing invention, the first working laser, and his other outstanding contributions to optics and photonics. This award will be presented during CLEO/QELS.
This award encourages academic excellence, presentation prowess and leadership skills.
The program includes an oral competition held at the CLEO/QELS event. Seven finalists are selected from the first round of applications. The finalists are then judged on their reference letters and presentation skills. Six of the seven finalists receive a $1,500 cash prize each, and the top finalist receives $5,000. Note: Students do not need to be CLEO/QELS authors to be considered.
Competitions at Peer Society Meetings
OSA supports student paper competitions held by the Australian Optical Society and the Optical Society of Korea respectively.
GRANTS
Student Travel Grants
The OSA Foundation provides travel support to students from developing nations so that they may attend OSA-sponsored technical meetings and conferences.
Student Chapter Activity Grants
OSA encourages programs that support our strategic challenges to increase membership, foster international activities, collaborate with other professional societies and, in general, support and publicize the optics community. Chapters are encouraged to apply for activity grants to support these activities each year.
Youth Science Education Outreach Grants
Sponsored by the OSA Foundation, these outreach grants support the grassroots education efforts of OSA Local Sections and Student Chapters. Qualifying programs focus on local educators, parents and students with the objective of sharing information and generating excitement about science.
SCHOLARSHIPS
Harvey M. Pollicove Memorial Scholarship
This annual scholarship, administered by the OSA Foundation, will be awarded to a student who is pursuing a degree in the field of precision optics manufacturing. This program honors the work of Harvey Pollicove and was made possible by the contributions of Harvey Pollicove’s friends and colleagues to the H.M. Pollicove Memorial Fund and the OSA Foundation. The 2008 scholarship will be presented to a student at the University of Rochester, New York, USA.
FELLOWSHIPS
Congressional Science and Engineering Fellowships
Congressional Fellowships are designed to provide a unique public policy learning experience, demonstrate the value of science-government interaction and bring technical backgrounds and external perspectives to the decision-making process of the U.S. Congress. Fellows spend one year working as special legislative assistants on the staffs of Members of Congress or congressional committees, beginning in September.
OSA offers two Congressional Fellowships. One program is jointly sponsored with the Materials Research Society and the other is jointly sponsored with The International Society for Optical Engineering.
Advancing the Science and Technology of Light
