MEMS pioneer wins ICO award

17 Jun 2002

Nabeel Riza has won the International Commission for Optics' annual prize.

The International Commission for Optics (ICO) has awarded its annual prize to Nabeel Riza, founder of Nuonics, US, and its Galileo Galilei award to Kehar Singh of the Indian Institute of Technology, India.

Riza is head of the Photonic Information Processing Systems Laboratory at CREOL in Florida and won the ICO prize for developing several optical beam control structures that have strongly impacted fields such as array sensor controls, interferometry, signal processing, fiber-optic switching and optical scanning.

Riza was among the first to independently propose the use of optical micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) for making fiber-optic switches. Specifically, he proposed the use of thin-film micromachined optical actuators for making optical switching systems for phased array systems.

In January 2001, Riza set up Nuonics to commercialize his invention of spatially multiplexed processing - a class of fault-tolerant fiber-optic components that eliminate single point MEMS device failure.

Singh won the ICO's Galileo Galilei award in recognition of his scientific contributions in the areas of statistical and information optics. The award is granted annually for outstanding contributions to the field of optics achieved under comparatively unfavorable circumstances.

Over three decades, Singh has contributed significantly to the advancement of statistical and information optics. His recent noteworthy contributions include: joint transform correlator schemes; nonlinear wave mixing in photorefractive crystals for image processing; and other optical processing schemes designed for the fairly complicated but practically significant conditions of partial coherence and aberration.

For more information about the award winners, please see the ICO Newsletter.

Author
Nadya Anscombe is editor of Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.