Contact:
Colleen Morrison
Optical Society of America
202.416.1437
cmorri@osa.org

Engineering Excellence Awards, Dekker Foundation Scholarship Bestowed 

Optical Society of America Honors Three in Optical Engineering

October 12, 2005 (Washington, DC)—The Optical Society of America is happy to announce that Michael G. Littman and René-Jean Essiambre are the 2005 Engineering Excellence Awards winners and Joyce Poon is the 2005 OSA-Dekker Foundation Student Scholarship recipient. All three will be honored at the joint Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science Plenary and Awards Ceremony on October 17, 2005 in Tucson, Arizona.

“This year's Engineering Excellence Award winners are true leaders in optical engineering today,” said Christopher Doerr, chair of the Engineering Excellence Award Selection Committee. “Both of them have made contributions that have helped carry the field forward.”

Littman will receive an Engineering Excellence Award for the development of the grazing incidence tunable laser and subsequent improvements including a geometrical scanning mechanism that allows for continuous single mode tuning with one moving element. He currently is a professor at Princeton University.

Essiambre was chosen to receive an Engineering Excellence Award for discoveries and seminal contributions to the field of nonlinear propagation in fibers and the development of dispersion maps used in commercially deployed lightwave communication systems. He is currently a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) of Bell Laboratories.

“The OSA-Dekker Foundation Scholarship recognizes the importance of supporting promising graduates in the photonics and optical engineering fields,” said Katherine Creath, chair of this year's Dekker selection committee. “This year's recipient is poised to become one of the field's leaders in the near future and we are happy to help her reach her full potential.”

Joyce Poon, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology will receive the 2005 OSA-Dekker Foundation Scholarship. Poon's current research is on slow light propagation in Coupled-Resonator Optical Waveguides (CROWs) and polymer microring resonator devices.

Each year, OSA bestows the Engineering Excellence awards to increase the visibility of optical engineers. The awards recognize technical achievements in optical engineering by individual(s) or teams.

The OSA-Dekker Foundation Scholarship is for $10,000 and is bestowed every other year to a graduate student in photonics or optical engineering. The criteria for selecting the winner are an applicant's GPA, resume, reference letters and a personal essay.

About OSA

The Optical Society of America (OSA) brings together an international network of the industry's preeminent optics and photonics scientists, engineers, educators, technicians and business leaders. Representing 15,000 members from approximately 100 different countries, OSA promotes the worldwide generation, application and dissemination of optics and photonics knowledge through its meetings, events and journals. Since its founding in 1916, OSA member benefits, programming, publications, products and services have set the industry's standard of excellence. Additional information on OSA is available on the Society's Web site at www.osa.org. OSA is proud to be a part of the World Year of Physics, a celebration of physics and the 100th anniversary of some of Einstein's greatest achievements. Optics is the branch of physics that studies the properties of light. For additional information on World Year of Physics, visit www.physics2005.org.

Editor's Note: Photos and complete biographies of the recipients are available upon request.

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