SPIE is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology, founded in 1955. It organizes technical conferences, trade exhibitions, and continuing education programs for researchers and developers in the light-based fields of physics, including: optics, photonics, and imaging engineering. The society publishes peer-reviewed scientific journals, conference proceedings, monographs, tutorial texts, field guides, and reference volumes in print and online. SPIE is especially well-known for Photonics West, one of the laser and photonics industry's largest combined conferences and tradeshows which is held annually in San Francisco. SPIE also participates as partners in leading educational initiatives, and in 2020, for example, provided more than $5.8 million in support of optics education and outreach programs around the world.
Philip St. John Russell, FRS, is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. His area of research covers "photonics and new materials", in particular the examination of new optical materials, especially of photonic crystal fibres, and more generally the field of nano- and micro-structured photonic materials.
The John Tyndall Award is given to the "individual who has made pioneering, highly significant, or continuing technical or leadership contributions to fiber optics technology". The award is named after John Tyndall (1820-1893), who demonstrated for the first time internal reflection.
Michal Lipson is an American physicist known for her work on silicon photonics. A member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2019, Lipson was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow for contributions to silicon photonics especially towards enabling GHz silicon active devices. Until 2014, she was the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering at Cornell University in the school of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Cornell. She is now the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. In 2009 she co-founded the company PicoLuz, which develops and commercializes silicon nanophotonics technologies. In 2019, she co-founded Voyant Photonics, which develops next generation lidar technology based on silicon photonics. In 2022, Lipson was a co-founder of Xscape photonics to accelerate AI, ML, and simulation hardware. In 2020 Lipson was elected the 2021 vice president of Optica, and she served as the Optica president in 2023.
Robert Louis Byer is a physicist. He was president of the Optical Society of America in 1994 and of the American Physical Society in 2012.
Rod C. Alferness was president of The Optical Society in 2008.
Susan Nicole Houde-Walter is both an academic and executive with technical background in optical physics and engineering. Her specialties include laser physics, optoelectronics, optical materials, and imaging science, with applications in national security. She has traveled extensively with the United States military and served on science and policy boards, including the Army Science Board, the Department of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, the Intelligence Science and Technology Expert Group | National Academies, and the National Defense Industry Association board on Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict.
G. Michael Morris was president of the Optical Society of America in 2002.
Constance J. Chang-Hasnain is a Taiwanese-American chemical engineer who is the chairperson and founder of Berxel Photonics Co. Ltd. and Whinnery Professor Emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. She was President of Optica in 2021.
James Clair Wyant was a professor at the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona where he was Director (1999–2005) and Dean (2005–2012). He received a B.S. in physics from Case Western Reserve University and M.S. and Ph.D. in optics from the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester.
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.
The William F. Meggers Award has been awarded annually since 1970 by the Optical Society for outstanding contributions to spectroscopy. It was established to honor William Frederick Meggers and his contributions to the fields of spectroscopy and metrology.
Alexandra Boltasseva is Ron And Dotty Garvin Tonjes Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, and editor-in-chief for The Optical Society's Optical Materials Express journal. Her research focuses on plasmonic metamaterials, manmade composites of metals that use surface plasmons to achieve optical properties not seen in nature.
The Edwin H. Land Medal is jointly presented by The Optical Society and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). The Land Medal was established in 1992 to honor the noted scientist and entrepreneur Edwin H. Land, who is noted for his invention of instant photography, for founding the Polaroid Corporation, and for developing the theory of Retinex, amongst many other accomplishments. It is funded by the Polaroid Foundation, the Polaroid Retirees Association and by individual contributors Manfred Heiting, Theodore Voss and John J. McCann. The medal honors individuals who, using the science of optics, "have demonstrated pioneering entrepreneurial activity that has had a major impact on the public."
Laura Na Liu is a Chinese physicist focused on researching nano-optics of three-dimensional meta materials as it applies to biology and chemistry. After receiving her undergraduate and master's degree in China, she has had many global opportunities for education and research including Germany and the United States of America. Today, she is a professor at University of Stuttgart in Germany. She has received several awards for her contributions in the field of optics.
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.
Nathalie Picqué is a French physicist working at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in the field Frequency Combs, where she studies ultra-high resolution spectroscopy using ultrashort pulses of light combined with Fourier-transform spectroscopy to reveal the fine chemistry of samples, in particular in the mid-infrared, demonstrating resolving power in excess of 1,000,000,000,000.
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.
Boon S. Ooi is a Malaysian–American academic researcher and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. He was faculty member at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) from 1996 to 2000 and at Lehigh University from 2003 to 2009. He served as Director of KACST-Technology Innovation Center at KAUST from 2012 to 2020.
