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Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award
The award was established in 2005 by a gift from Joseph W. and Hon Mai Goodman, and is co-sponsored with SPIE.
Society Connection
Joseph Goodman has served the society in a number of volunteer roles including the Foundation Board, Board of Directors, and as 1992 President. He is a Fellow and Honorary Member, and the recipient of the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus W. Quinn Prize, Esther Hoffman Beller Medal, and Emmett N. Leith Medal.
Hon-Mai Goodman served as Assistant to the Editor of the Journal of the Optical Society of the America from 1978 – 1983.
Key Funders
Joseph W. and Hon Mai Goodman
About Joseph W. Goodman
Goodman received the AB Degree in Engineering and Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1958, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1960 and 1963, respectively. He is known for his research and education in optical information processing, holography and statistical optics, specifically for his work on the statistical properties of speck and optical interconnections.
He finished his doctorate just as the cw laser became commercially available and as a new era of holography and optical information processing was opened by Emmett Leith and his colleagues. His fields of research included holography, optical information processing, digital image processing, statistical problems in optics, optical switching, and speckle phenomena. His early work focused on noise and nonlinearities in holography, electronic detection and digital reconstruction of holograms, and the statistical properties of optical speckle patterns.
Goodman joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 1967. He chaired the department from 1989 to 1996, and then served as senior associate dean of engineering until 2000. He retired from Stanford in 2001. He is the author of Introduction to Fourier Optics (now in its 3rd edition), Statistical Optics, Speckle Phenomena in Optics, and co-author of Fourier Transforms: An Introduction for Engineers.
Quite active in the optics community’s professional societies, Goodman has served in leadership roles for OSA, SPIE, and IEEE. His participation has extended to international activities as well, including serving as a member of the US delegation to the first and second US-Japan Seminars on Optical Data Processing and Holography, and as a member of the US delegation to the first US-USSR seminar on optical data processing. He also led the International Commission for Optics in the late 1980s.
He has served the society in a number of volunteer roles including various award and program committees, the Foundation Board, the Board of Directors, and as the 1992 President. He has also received numerous awards from the IEEE, the ASEE, and SPIE, including the highest awards given by the latter two societies.
Goodman was a co-founder of Optivision, Inc., ONI Systems, and Nanoprecision Products, Inc. and served as a member of the Board of Directors of E-TEK Dynamics and Ondax Inc.
About Hon Mai Goodman
Goodman was born in Macao and came to the US to attend Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa. Following graduation with a BA degree from Clarke, she entered a dietetic internship program at Stanford University Hospital.
Upon completion of her internship, she worked as a dietitian at Stanford University Hospital until her marriage in 1962. She was Assistant to the Editor of the Journal of the Optical Society of the America from 1978-1983.
She is a Board Member of the Goodman Family Foundation, which invests in nonprofits that improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay and Portland, Oregon areas.
