Optica is a professional society of individuals and companies with an interest in optics and photonics. It publishes journals, organizes conferences and exhibitions, and carries out charitable activities.
Eli Yablonovitch is an American physicist and engineer who, along with Sajeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987. He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite. In addition to pioneering photonic crystals, he was the first to recognize that a strained quantum-well laser has a significantly reduced threshold current compared to its unstrained counterpart. This is now employed in the majority of semiconductor lasers fabricated throughout the world. His seminal paper reporting inhibited spontaneous emission in photonic crystals is among the most highly cited papers in physics and engineering.
John Roy Whinnery was an American electrical engineer and educator who worked in the fields of microwave theory and laser experimentation.
Xi-Cheng Zhang is a Chinese-born American physicist, currently serving as the Parker Givens Chair of Optics at the University of Rochester, and the director of the Institute of Optics. He is also the Chairman of the Board and President of Zomega Terahertz Corporation.
The University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, considered the largest institute for optics education in the United States, is dedicated to research and education in optics with an emphasis on optical engineering. The college offers more than 90 courses in optical sciences, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Optical Sciences and Engineering, Masters and Doctoral degree programs in Optical Sciences, as well as a dual master's degree in Optical Sciences and Business Administration. The college also offers comprehensive distance learning courses leading to a Professional Graduate Certificate or a master's degree and markets non-credit short courses on DVD to optics professionals.
Anthony Michael Johnson is an American experimental physicist, a professor of physics, and a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He is the director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research (CASPR), also situated on campus at UMBC. Since his election to the 2002 term as president of the Optical Society, formerly the Optical Society of America, Johnson has the distinction of being the first and only African-American president to date. Johnson's research interests include the ultrafast photophysics and nonlinear optical properties of bulk, nanostructured, and quantum well semiconductor structures, ultrashort pulse propagation in fibers and high-speed lightwave systems. His research has helped to better understand processes that occur in ultrafast time frames of 1 quadrillionth of a second. Ultrashort pulses of light have been used to address technical and logistical challenges in medicine, telecommunications, homeland security, and have many other applications that enhance contemporary life.
In physics, a high contrast grating is a single layer near-wavelength grating physical structure where the grating material has a large contrast in index of refraction with its surroundings. The term near-wavelength refers to the grating period, which has a value between one optical wavelength in the grating material and that in its surrounding materials.
David A. B. Miller is the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he is also a professor of Applied Physics by courtesy. His research interests include the use of optics in switching, interconnection, communications, computing, and sensing systems, physics and applications of quantum well optics and optoelectronics, and fundamental features and limits for optics and nanophotonics in communications and information processing.
John Michael Dallesasse is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where his research is focused on silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), nanophotonics, semiconductor lasers / transistor lasers and photonics-electronics integration. He has over 60 publications and presentations, and holds 29 issued patents.
Byoungho Lee was a South Korean scientist best known for his work on three-dimensional displays and nanophotonics. From 1994 until his death, he was on the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Seoul National University. He and his research group published more than 400 peer-reviewed international journal papers, more than 700 international conference papers, and more than 20 books and book chapters. His accumulated citations are over 23,000 and his h-index is 75. At the time of his death, he was the dean of the Engineering College of Seoul National University.
James J. Coleman is an electrical engineer who worked at Bell Labs, Rockwell International, and the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is best known for his work on semiconductor lasers, materials and devices including strained-layer indium gallium arsenide lasers and selective area epitaxy. Coleman is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.
Donna Theo Strickland is a Canadian optical physicist and pioneer in the field of pulsed lasers. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, together with Gérard Mourou, for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification. She is a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Govind P. Agrawal is an Indian American physicist and a fellow of Optica, Life Fellow of the IEEE, and Distinguished Fellow of the Optical Society of India. He is the recipient of James C. Wyant Professorship of Optics at the Institute of Optics and a professor of physics at the University of Rochester. He is also a Distinguished scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) in the University of Rochester. Agrawal has authored and co-authored several highly cited books in the fields of non-linear fiber optics, optical communications, and semiconductor lasers.
Martin D. Dawson FInstP FOSA FIEEE FRSE FRS is a British professor of photonics who is research director of the Institute of Photonics at the University of Strathclyde and is Head of Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics. He has made pioneering contributions in several applied photonics areas.
John E. Bowers is an American physicist, engineer, researcher and educator. He holds the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology, the director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and a distinguished professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials at University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the deputy director of American Institute of Manufacturing of Integrated Photonics from 2015 to 2022.
Boubacar Kanté is a Malian American physicist and engineer working in the field of wave-matter interaction and optoelectronics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the inaugural Chenming Hu Endowed Chaired Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS).. He is also faculty scientist at the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research focuses on optical phenomena at a very small scale, developing nanostructures to harness the interaction of light and matter, such as metamaterials, scalable lasers, topological lasers, compact lenses, or energy harvesting nanostructures. He is mostly known for his invention of scale-invariant lasers, overcoming a more than six-decade old challenge on the scaling of semiconductor lasers with a laser known as the Berkeley Surface Emitting Laser or BerkSEL. He also pioneered topological lasers with his proposal and demonstration of the world first topological laser based on the quantum Hall effect for light
Peter J. Delfyett Jr is an American engineer and Pegasus Professor and Trustee Chair Professor of Optics, ECE & Physics at the University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics.
Stefan Andersson-Engels is a Swedish biophysicist specializing in the field of biophotonics. He is professor at University College Cork and the deputy director of the Irish Photonics Integration Center (IPIC) within the Science Foundation Ireland. Before joining University College Cork, he was Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Lund University. He has co-founded 3 biophotonics companies Spectracure, Lumito, BioPixS. He also co-founded biannual biophotonics summer school.
Carmen S. Menoni is an Argentine-American physicist who is the University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. Her research considers oxide materials for interference coatings and spectrometry imaging. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, American Physical Society, Optica, and SPIE. Menoni served as the President of the IEEE Photonics Society from 2020 to 2021.
Alexander Luis Gaeta is an American physicist and the David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics at Columbia University. He is known for his work on quantum and nonlinear photonics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Optica, and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
