Women in Photonics Excellence Award

For leading contributions to the science and application of amorphous oxide coatings to gravitational wave detectors and ultrahigh intensity lasers, as well as exemplary leadership in championing for the inclusion of students and young professionals.

Dr. Carmen S. Menoni is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  She also holds appointments in the Department of Chemistry and the School of Advanced Materials Discovery.  Prof. Menoni’s group investigates the synthesis of amorphous thin film oxides by sputtering and uses spectroscopic and other material diagnostics to identify their structural organization at the nanoscale.  Through a combination of fundamental understanding of the optical and structural properties of the thin films materials and device engineering, Prof. Menoni’s research is advancing the state-of-art in interference coatings for ultra-high intensity lasers and for gravitational wave detectors. Menoni is also involved in using high-brightness coherent beams of light of wavelengths between 10-50 nm for optics applications such as nanoscale imaging, ablation and chemical imaging.  Prof. Menoni is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the American Physical Society (APS),  the Optical Society of America (OSA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE).  Prof. Menoni was President of the IEEE Photonics Society in 2020-2021.