Outstanding graduate students win Optical Society Awards

Washington DC.   The Optical Society of America (OSA) has announced that Irina Novikova of Texas A & M University, Jay Sharping of Northwestern University and Randy Bartels of the University of Colorado-Boulder have each earned top honors and $10,000 grand prizes at the society’s 4th Annual New Focus Student Awards. The awards ceremony was recently held at the 2001 Optical Society of America Annual Meeting in Long Beach and was established in 1997 with the support of Milton Chang and New Focus Incorporated, to encourage research excellence, presentation prowess, and leadership in the optics community.

During the award competition 8 international student finalists, nominated by their professors for making outstanding contributions to the optics field, personally presented their research papers as they competed for the three grand prizes of $10,000 and five top prizes of $2,500.  This year’s event was described as a high-energy forum where cutting-edge new ideas in photonics, laser and electro-optics were unveiled and put to test with prizes awarded on the basis of the importance of the graduate student’s research work.

The grand prizewinners presented papers reflecting exciting research arenas and growing applications within the electro-optics and photonics fields.  Irina Novikova, a Texas A & M Ph.D. candidate in Atomic and Quantum Physics, won for her work in the area of nonlinear Faraday rotation in dense Rb vapor. Jay Sharping, a Ph.D. candidate in Photonics Technology and Quantum Optics at Northwestern was recognized for his research in the area of nonlinear fiber optics in microstructure fibers. Randy Bartels, a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado­Boulder was honored for his research into the control of atoms and molecules using shaped light pulses.

Runners up, who received the top prize of $2,500 each, were Mehmet Bayindir, Bilkent University, Turkey, Wanli Chi, University of Rochester, Dimitri Pappas, University of Florida, USA, Yuri Shpolyanskiy, St. Petersburg State Institute of Fine Mechanics & Optics, Russia and Alexey Ukrainsky, St. Petersburg State Institute of Fine Mechanics & Optics, Russia. 

The Optical Society of America (www.osa.org) brings together the worldwide optics and photonics community of scientists, engineers, educators, technicians and business leaders. The purposes of the organization are scientific, technical and educational. Since its founding in 1916, OSA member benefits, programming, publications and products have set the profession’s standard of excellence. OSA’s membership totals over 15,000 individuals from over 70 countries.