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08 May 2018
The Optical Society Names the 2018 Max Born Award Recipient
8 May 2018
The Optical Society Names the 2018 Max Born Award Recipient
WASHINGTON —The Optical Society (OSA) is pleased to name Demetrios Christodoulides, CREOL - The College of Optics & Photonics, University of Central Florida, USA, the 2018 Max Born Award recipient. Christodoulides is recognized for founding and continuing to lead the fields of parity-time non-Hermitian optics and accelerating waves, and for groundbreaking contributions in multiple areas in physical optics.
This OSA award honors Max Born, who made distinguished contributions to physics in general and to optics in particular. The award is presented to a person who has made outstanding contributions to physical optics, theoretical or experimental. It was established in 1982, the centenary of Born's birth, and is endowed by the United Technologies Research Center, Physical Optics Corporation, and individuals including Joseph Goodman.
“By harnessing ideas stemming from non-Hermiticity and parity-time (PT) symmetry, novel classes of synthetic structures and devices with counter-intuitive properties can be realized,” stated Nozomi Nishimura, Award Selection Committee Chair and Assistant Professor, Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, Cornell University, New York. “Demetri’s work could potentially enable new possibilities in the field of optics and integrated photonics.”
Demetri Christodoulides is currently a Pegasus and the Cobb Family Endowed Chair Professor at CREOL-The College of Optics and Photonics of the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1986. During the following two years, he joined Bellcore as a post-doctoral fellow. From 1988 to 2002 he was with the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lehigh University. He has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics and JOSA B. He is a Fellow of the OSA and APS. In 2011, he received the OSA R.W. Wood Prize.
Christodoulides’ contributions have been in the general field of optics and photonics. These inlcude 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.
About The Optical Society
Founded in 1916, The Optical Society (OSA) is the leading professional organization for scientists, engineers, students and entrepreneurs who fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate achievements in the science of light. Through world-renowned publications, meetings and membership initiatives, OSA provides quality research, inspired interactions and dedicated resources for its extensive global network of optics and photonics experts. For more information, visit osa.org.
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