IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award

Established to honor an individual who has made outstanding technical contributions to photonics (broadly defined) prior to his or her 35th birthday.

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Nomination Period: July 1 – September 30

View all nomination requirements and details.

Nominators must complete a nominee submission by September 30th each year with the following:

Candidate contact information: Name, Affiliation, Mailing address, Email, Phone Number, Date of Birth (candidate must be under 35 years of age or younger on 30 September of year in which nomination is made)

Statement of a specific contribution(s) that qualify Nominee for Award, as well as other related accomplishments. (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)
Candidates need not be members of the IEEE or the Photonics Society.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
SEPTEMBER 30

View Present & Past Winners

About the Award

The IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award was established to honor an individual who has made outstanding technical contributions to photonics (broadly defined) prior to his or her 35th birthday.

Presented to: An individual

Scope: To recognize outstanding technical contributions to photonics (broadly defined) prior to the candidates 35th birthday.

Prize: A Certificate and Honorarium

Basis for judging: Candidates are rank-ordered by their qualifications and accomplishments, then discussed by recognized experts on the committee in order to arrive at a final decision.

Honoring Professor W. Alec Gambling

Professor W. A. Gambling FRS, FREng (1926 – 2021) was one of the pioneers worldwide in the development and use of optical fiber communications. He began his research in microwave communications in the late 1950s before moving into lasers and optics in the 1960s. In 1966 he founded the renowned Optical Fiber Group at the University of Southampton and led it through to 1989 when it became the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), of which he was the first Director, from 1989 to 1996. During his distinguished career, he received numerous awards and encouraged and mentored dozens of students and young researchers from around the world and it is in his honor that this award is presented.

Introducing Our Award Honorees

We are proud to recognize and celebrate honorees of the IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award.

Our Most Recent Honoree

Deep Jariwala

Chia Wei (Wade) Hsu, 2024

For seminal work on bound states in the continuum in optics and for breakthroughs in computational electromagnetics and imaging.

Chia Wei (Wade) Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. Wade’s interests span nanophotonics, wave propagation and imaging in scattering media, computational electromagnetics, inverse design, nonlinear laser dynamics, and non-Hermitian photonics. He was the recipient of the American Physical Society LeRoy Apker Award, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Sony Faculty Innovation Award, Charles Lee Powell Faculty Research Award, and PIERS Young Scientist Award.

View All Award Winners

Year	Award Winner	Description
2023	Lin Chang	For the development of highly nonlinear ultra-low loss photonic platforms
2022	Deep Jariwala	For breakthrough advances in optical characterization and understanding of light-matter coupling in excitonic and strongly-correlated semiconductors.
2021	Xi (Vivian) Chen	For outstanding contributions to high-speed and high-capacity fiber-optic communications.
2020	Mikhail Kats	For contributions in the fields of nanophotonics and optical materials, especially for metasurfaces, optics with phase-transition materials, and thermal-emission engineering.
2019	Junjie Yao	For pioneering novel photo-acoustic imaging that allows probing living tissue functions at unprecedented accuracy, sensitivity, and speed.
2018	Yu Shrike Zhang	For pioneering contributions in applying biophotonics to characterization of engineered tissue constructs.
2017	Hannah Joyce	For significant contributions to nanowire optoelectronics and terhertz spectroscopy.
2016	Igor Aharonovich	For contribution to the development of single photon emitters in wide bandgap materials.
2015	Jeremy N. Munday	For pioneering contributions to plasmonic and photonic light-trapping in solar cells.
2014	Ertugrul Cubukcu	For contributions to photonics beyond the diffraction limit with nanoantenna-based devices and sensors.
2013	Alexandra Boltasseva	For seminal contributions to the development of metal-dielectric waveguides for integrated optics and novel approaches for realization of nanoplasmonic devices.
2012	William Green	For contributions in CMOS integrable, highly scaled, Silicon Nano-Photonics, and pioneering Silicon Photonics for mid-infrared applications and non-linear-optics.
2011	Hatice Altug	For contributions on nanoplasmonics and integrated nanofluidics for biological sensing and spectroscopy.
2010	Sander Lars Jansen	For pioneering contributions in optical OFDM for fiber-optic transmission systems.
2009	Aydogan Ozcan	For his pioneering contributions to non-destructive non-linear material characterization techniques, near-field and on-chip imaging and diagnostic systems.
2008	Jose Azana	For pioneer contributions on innovative ultra-fast optical pulse processing techniques, particularly temporal self-imaging (Talbot) effects, using all-fiber grating technologies.
2007	Randy Bartels	For pioneering contributions to ultrafast molecular photonics and photonic reagent control of quantum systems on an unprecedented time-scale.