Four with ties to Institute become fellows of SPIE

January 10, 2019

collage of spie recipientsFrom left to right: Thomas Brown, Gerard Mourou, Linda Smith and Donna Strickland.

A current and former faculty member and two alumnae of the Institute of Optics – including two recent Nobel laureates -- have been promoted to fellows of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

The new fellows are Thomas Brown, professor of optics; Gerard Mourou, a former Institute faculty member now at the Ecole Polytechnique, France; Linda Smith ’89, president of CERES Technology Advisors, Inc., and Donna Strickland (’89 PhD), now professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Brown’s citation is for his “achievements in optical modeling & multidimensional microscopy.” A member of the Institute faculty since 1987, Brown was the founding director of the Robert E. Hopkins Center for Optical Design and Engineering, the architect of the optical engineering curriculum at the Institute, and currently serves as the academic co-lead for Test, Assembly and Packaging within AIM Photonics. 

Mourou and Strickland are both being recognized for “achievements in the method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.” They shared in this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for work they undertook at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics on “chirped-pulse amplification,” which enabled the use of lasers as a high-powered tool. The work was the basis of Strickland’s PhD dissertation at Rochester.

Smith, whose citation is for achievements in entrepreneurship, has almost 25 years of experience in mergers and acquisitions, strategic marketing, business valuation, product management, and sales in the photonics industry. CERES is an M&A advisory firm small to mid-market companies employing photonics technologies to address a wide range of markets. Smith is also a member of the Visiting Committee of the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Rochester. 

SPIE fellows are members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. They are honored for their technical achievement and for their service to the general optics community and to SPIE in particular. For a full listing of the 88 new fellows, click here.