The Photonics Society Joint Awards Committee serves as the evaluation and selection committee for our four Society Career Awards; the Aron Kressel Award, the Engineering Achievement Award, the Quantum Electronics Award, and the William Streiffer Scientific Achievement Award.
The Aron Kressel Award recognizes those individuals who have made important contributions to opto‐electronic device technology. The device technology cited is to have had a significant impact on their applications in major practical systems.
The 2024 Aron Kressel Award recipient is Mona Jarrahi, “For groundbreaking contributions to
plasmonic terahertz optoelectronic devices and imaging/spectroscopy systems.”
MONA JARRAHI received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2000 and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2003 and 2007. She is currently a Professor and Northrop Grumman Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California Los Angeles. Prof. Jarrahi has made significant contributions to the development of ultrafast electronic and optoelectronic devices and integrated systems for terahertz, infrared, and millimeter-wave sensing, imaging, computing, and communication by utilizing plasmonics, novel optical materials and quantum structures. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, OPTICA, APS, SPIE, and IoP and the outcomes of her research have appeared in more than 300 publications.
The Engineering Achievement Award recognizes an exceptional engineering contribution which has had a significant impact on the development of laser or electro-optic technology or the commercial application of technology within the past 10 years.
The Engineering Achievement Award recipient is Pavel Cheben “For pioneering contributions to
silicon photonic waveguide devices, including the invention of metamaterial waveguides and advancing sub-wavelength integrated photonics technology.”
Dr. PAVEL CHEBEN is a Principal Research Officer at the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Malaga and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Ottawa, the University of Toronto, Carleton University, McMaster University, and the University of Zilina. Dr. Cheben is best known for his work in subwavelength silicon photonics, pioneering a new field of research that merges metamaterial technology with integrated photonics.
He has co-authored more than 800 publications, 42 patent applications, and over 300 invited presentations.
Dr. Cheben is an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, IEEE, SPIE, Optica, American Physical Society, European Optical Society, Institute of Physics, Engineering Institute of Canada, and Canadian Academy of Engineering. He is also the recipient of the Order of the Slovak Republic, the International Prize of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the Government of Canada’s Public Service Excellence Award, the NRC Research Excellence Award, and the NRC Industrial Achievement Award. Dr. Cheben is the most published scientist at NRC Canada for the past decade.
The Quantum Electronics Award is presented to Alexey Gorshkov, “for pioneering contributions to understanding, design, and control of interacting quantum systems, with applications including
quantum computers, sensors, and networks.”
ALEXEY GORSHKOV received his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard in 2004 and 2010, respectively. In 2013, after three years as a Lee A. DuBridge Postdoctoral Scholar at Caltech, he became a staff physicist at NIST. At the same time, he started his own research group at the University of Maryland, where he is a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science.
His theoretical research is at the interface of quantum optics, atomic physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum information science. Applications of his research include quantum computing, quantum communication, and quantum sensing. He is a recipient of many awards including the 2023 Samuel Wesley Stratton Award, the 2022 Optica Fellowship, the 2020 Arthur S. Flemming Award, the 2020 APS Fellowship, and the 2019 PECASE.
The William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award recognizes an exceptional single scientific contribution, which has had a significant impact in the field of lasers and electro-optics in the past 10 years. Endowed by Xerox Corporation and Spectra Diode Laboratories, the award honors an individual or a group for a single contribution of significant work in the field.
The William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award recipient is Andrea Alu “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, nano-optics, 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).
