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Awards

IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award

Recognizes outstanding achievements in Opto-Electronic device technology.

Nominate a Colleague Today!

Nomination period: Feb 1 – April 5

Nominators must complete a nominee submission by April 5th each year with the following: 

  • Statement of a specific technical accomplishment or contribution(s) that qualify Nominee for Award, including the impact of the work, as well as other related accomplishments; publications, patents, etc. that demonstrate the most significant impact. (Maximum of three pages)

  • Proposed Award Citation: (Word Count: 20) 

  • Nominee’s curriculum vita (Maximum of three pages)

  • Endorsements: Three letters of endorsement are required.  You may enter the endorsers name and email to send an automatically generated email request, or if you have received the endorsement, you can upload directly to the system. (One page limit)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
APRIL 5, 2023

About the Award

Presented to: An individual or team, up to three in number

Scope: To recognize outstanding achievements in Opto-Electronic device technology.

Prize: A Bronze Medallion, A Certificate and Honorarium

Honorarium Basis for judging: In the evaluation process, the following criteria are considered: The device technology cited is to have had a significant impact on their applications in major practical systems. The intent is to recognize key contributors to the field for developments of critical components, which lead to the development of systems enabling major new services or capabilities. These achievements should have been accomplished in a prior time frame sufficient to permit evaluation of their lasting impact. The work cited could have appeared in the form of publications, patents, products, or simply general recognition by the professional community that the individual cited is the agreed upon originator of the advance upon which the award decision is based.

Sponsored by:

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spectra laboratories logo

Administered by:

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Introducing Our Award Honorees

We are proud to recognize and celebrate honorees of the IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award.

Our Most Recent Honoree

ALU Photo IEEE WSSAA 2024

Andrea Alu, 2024

For seminal contributions to the field of photonic metamaterials and their applications.

Andrea Alu is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), the Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Founding Director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York. He received his Laurea (2001), MS (2003) and PhD (2007) from the University of Roma Tre, and was the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor at the University of Texas at Austin until 2018. In 2015 he was the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Visiting Professor at the AMOLF Institute in the Netherlands. His research interests span over applied electromagnetics, nanooptics, polaritonics and acoustics. Alù is credited with a number of discoveries, including the first experimental demonstration of a three-dimensional electromagnetic cloak, of nonreciprocal phenomena in magnet-free metamaterials, of electromagnetic time-reflections and of extreme nonlinearities in quantum-engineered metasurfaces. Dr. Alù is the President of the Metamorphose Virtual Institute for Artificial Electromagnetic Materials and Metamaterials, the Director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Wave Phenomena Driven by Symmetries and the Chair of the IEEE Joint New York Chapter. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Optical Materials Express, a Simons Investigator in Physics since 2016, a Full Member of URSI, a Life Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Materials Research Society (MRS), Optica, the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) and the American Physical Society (APS). Since 2017, he has been a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Web of Science). He has received several awards and recognitions for his research activities, including the Max Born Award (2024), the SPIE Mozi Award (2024), the IEEE AP-S Distinguished Achievement Award (2023), the Brillouin Medal (2021), the Blavatnik National Award in Physical Sciences and Engineering (2021), the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2020), the DoD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2019), the ICO Prize in Optics (2016), the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering (2016), the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award (2015), the Franco Strazzabosco Award for Young Engineers (2013), the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011).

View All Award Winners

Year Award Winner Citation
2023 Shinji Matsuo For contributions to ultra-high speed, low power consumption membrane lasers and their heterogeneous integration.
2022 John Ballato For pioneering contributions to the science, engineering, and application of optoelectronic fibers.
2021 Paras N. Prasad For pioneering contributions in multiphoton processes in molecular materials and developing technologies that advance biophotonics for multiphoton imaging and therapy.
2020 Peter J. Delfyett, Jr. For pioneering contributions to semiconductor diode based ultrafast laser science and technology.
2019 Bahram Javidi For transformative innovations on automated disease identification using field portable optical-imaging based bio-photonics sensors.
2018 Roland Ryf For contributions to the understanding and development of Space-Division Multiplexing in optical fibers.
2017 Nader Engheta For development of, and pioneering contributions to extreme-parameter metamaterials in optics and photonics.
2016 Ming C. Wu For pioneering contributions in micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS).
2015 Vladimir Shalaev For seminal contributions both to the theoretical framework and to the ground-breaking experimental realization of optical metamaterials.
2014 Gadi Eisenstein For fundamental contributions to the dynamical properties of semiconductor lasers and amplifiers.
2013 Curtis R. Menyuk For seminal advances in the fundamental understanding and mitigation of polarization effects in high-performance optical fiber communication systems.
2012 Qing Hu For pioneering contribution in the development of high-temperature, high-power, and broadly tunable THz QCLs, and applications in imaging and sensing.
2011 Xi-Cheng Zhang For exceptional contribution of terahertz (THz) air photonics, especially free-space coherent detection of ultra-broadband THz waves.
2010 Dieter Bimberg
For demonstration of quantum dot lasers and pioneering contributions to semiconductor nanophotonics.
2009 Christopher Doerr For pioneering research on highly functional integrated optical circuits based on arrayed waveguide grating routers and their implementation in advanced optical networks.
2008 Fumio Koyama For contributions to vertical cavity surface emitting semiconductor lasers and dynamic single-mode semiconductor laser.
2007 Shun-Lien Chuang For contributions to the development of the fundamental theories of strained quantum-well lasers and the physics of optoelectronics devices.
2006
William H. Steier
Larry R. Dalton
Harold Fetterman
For seminal contributions to the advancement of polymer photonic devices and materials.
2005 Emmanuel Desurvire For pioneering contributions to the physical and theoretical understanding of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers and their early device development.
2004 Yasuhiko Arakawa For pioneering contributions to quantum confinement effects in semiconductor lasers and the development of quantum dot lasers.
2003 Connie Chang-Hasnain For pioneering contributions to vertical cavity surface emitting lasers and VCSEL arrays for wavelength-division-multiplexing applications.
2002 James Fujimoto For pioneering contributions to optical coherence tomography.
2001
Joe C. Campbell
Stephen R. Forrest
For contributions to the development of high-speed, low-noise long-wavelength avalanche and p-i-n photodiodes.
2000 James J. Coleman For pioneering research in high reliability strained layer semiconductor lasers.
1999
Jonathan Heritage
Andrew Weiner
For pioneering contributions to femtosecond optical pulse shaping technology and its applications.
1998
Federico Capasso
Jerome Faist
For the design, demonstration, and pioneering development of the quantum cascade laser which is revolutionizing the field of mid-infrared semiconductor lasers.
1997 Peter F. Moulton For the invention of the titanium sapphire tunable infrared laser which opened a new era of solid state ultrafast lasers.
1996
John E. Bowers
Kam Y. Lau
For significant contributions to the understanding and design of high speed semiconductor lasers.
1995
Stuart Searles
Charles Brau
George Hart
James Ewing
For the demonstration and development of excimer lasers.
1994
Martin A. Pollack
Robert E. Nahory
For pioneering work in III-V compound semiconductor materials and optoelectronic integrated circuits.
1993 Eli Yablonovitch For contributions to optoelectronics including the physics of strained layer lasers and photonic applications of low dimensional structures.
1992 Kenichi Iga For pioneering research in vertical-cavity surface-emitting injection lasers.
1991
Thomas L. Koch
Uziel Koren
For pioneering and innovative contributions to photonic integrated circuits.