Demetri Christodoulides is currently Pegasus Professor and the Cobb Family Endowed Chair of Optics & Photonics at CREOL-The College of Optics and Photonics of the University of Central Florida. He received his PhD degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1986. After his PhD he joined Bellcore as a post-doctoral fellow and was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lehigh University from 1988-2002. He has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics and JOSA B. He is a Fellow of the Society and APS. He is the 2011 recipient of the R.W. Wood Prize and the 2018 Max Born Award.

Christodoulides’ contributions have been in the general field of optics and photonics. Among them is the first prediction of discrete self-trapped states in optical lattices, Bragg solitons in nonlinear gratings, vector solitons, and the development of the theory describing nonlinear optical interactions in soft matter and biological colloidal systems. His group proposed and demonstrated optical accelerating beams that are nowadays finding applications in microscopy, nonlinear optics and plasmonics. In recent years, his work focused on the ramifications and applications of some special symmetries in optics such as that of parity-time symmetry and supersymmetry.