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John Tyndall Award
This award is named for the 19th century British scientist who was the first to demonstrate a phenomenon of internal reflection. First presented in 1987, the Tyndall Award recognizes an individual who has made pioneering, highly significant, or continuing technical or leadership contributions to fiber optics technology. Corning, Inc. endows the award, a glass sculpture that represents the concept of total internal reflection. Recipients of the John Tyndall Award receive a certificate and a cash prize of $3,200.
The winner of the 2004 John Tyndall Award was Larry A. Coldren for contributions to semiconductor laser diode technology, including widely tunable DBR lasers and vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers.
Larry A. Coldren is the Fred Kavli Professor of Optoelectronics and Sensors at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. He is also Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Agility Communications, Inc. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1972. After 13 years in the research area at Bell Laboratories, he joined UC-Santa Barbara in 1984 where he now holds appointments in Materials and Electrical & Computer Engineering, and is Director of the Optoelectronics Technology Center. In 1990 he co-founded Optical Concepts, later acquired as Gore Photonics, to develop novel VCSEL technology; and in 1998 he co-founded Agility Communications to develop widely-tunable integrated transmitters.
At Bell Labs Coldren initially worked on waveguided surface-acoustic-wave signal processing devices and coupled-resonator filters. He later developed tunable coupled-cavity lasers using novel reactive-ion etching (RIE) technology that he created for the then new InP-based materials. At UCSB he continued work on multiple-section tunable lasers, in 1988 inventing the widely-tunable multi-element mirror concept, which is now fundamental to many of Agility’s products. During the late eighties he also developed efficient vertical-cavity multiple-quantum-well modulators, which led to novel vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) designs that provided unparalleled levels of performance. Prof. Coldren continues to be active in developing new photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and VCSEL technology, including the underlying materials growth and fabrication techniques. In recent years, for example, he has been involved in the creation of vertical and in-plane GaN-based emitters, efficient all-epitaxial InP-based VCSELs, and a variety of PICs incorporating numerous optical elements for widely-tunable integrated transmitters, receivers, and wavelength converters.
Professor Coldren has authored or co-authored over 500 papers, 5 book chapters, 1 textbook, and has been issued 36 patents. He has presented dozens of invited and plenary talks at major conferences, and he is a Fellow of the IEEE, OSA, and IEE.
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IEEE Photonics Award
The IEEE Photonics Award is presented for outstanding achievements in photonics. It may be presented to an individual or a team of not more than three. Photonics is defined as the science and technology of generating and harnessing light and other forms of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon.
It is awarded for, but not limited to: light-generation, transmission, deflection, amplification and detection and the optical/electro-optical componentry and instrumentation used to accomplish these functions.
Also included are storage technologies utilizing photonics to read or write data and optical display technologies. It also extends from energy generation/propagation, communications, information processing, storage and display, biomedical and medical uses of light and measurement applications.
It was presented for the first time in 2004 to Tingye Li for leadership, vision, and pioneering contributions in the fields of optical fiber communications and laser science.
Tingye Li retired from AT&T on December 1, 1998. Until then, he has been a Division Manager in the Communications Infrastructure Research Laboratory of AT&T Laboratories in New Jersey. He is now an independent consultant in the field of lightwave communications. Since joining AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1957, he has worked in the areas of antennas, microwave propagation, lasers and optical communications, in which he has contributed more than 100 journal papers, patents, books and book chapters. His early work on laser resonator modes established the basis for the understanding of laser operation and is considered a classic. Since the late 1960s, he and his groups have been engaged in pioneering research on lightwave technologies and systems, which are now ubiquitously deployed in all arenas of telecommunications. His latest work with his colleagues on amplified wavelength-division-multiplexed transmission systems, which they were the first to advocate for upgrading the transmission capacity of long-distance telecommunications networks, has revolutionized lightwave communications.
He holds a Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Photonic Society of Chinese-Americans, and the International Engineering Consortium. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Among the many awards he has received are the IEEE 1975 W. R. G. Baker Prize, the IEEE 1979 David Sarnoff Award, the OSA/IEEE 1995 John Tyndall Award, the OSA 1997 Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus Quinn Endowment, the 1997 AT&T Science and Technology Medal, the IEEE 2004 Photonics Award, the 1981 Alumni Merit Award from Northwestern University, and Achievement Awards from the Chinese Institute of Engineers/USA in 1978, the Chinese-American Academic and Professional Society in 1983, and the Photonics Society of Chinese-Americans in 1998. He was named an honorary professor at many universities in China (including Tsinghua Univ., Shanghai Jiaotong Univ., Beijing Univ. of Posts and Telecommunications, Northern Jiaotong Univ., Fudan Univ., Nankai Univ., Tianjin, Univ., Univ. of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Qufu Normal Univ.), and was granted an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree by and named an honorary professor at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. He has been active in various professional societies, and was President of the OSA in 1995. |